Harvard Divinity School is delighted to announce that the 2023 winners of the Buechner Prize are Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato, MDiv ’23, and Suzannah Omonuk, MDiv ’23. The prize is awarded annually to the two authors of MDiv senior papers whose work best exemplifies the religious and literary ideals of writer-theologian Frederick Buechner, who passed away in August 2022.
Suzannah Omonuk’s “In the garden we sat weeping” is a collection of poems that Omonuk describes as “searchlights of the years I have spent being someone who is still seeking and who also in the meantime believes.”
Omonuk’s advisors describe her work as “a profoundly moving series of poems that reorients the world as we may have known it, opening us up to surges of sorrow and torrents of insight, guiding us through portals of passion and tender care.”
“The honor of this prize is a testament to HDS’s commitment to providing support for the development and flourishing of artistic expression at the School,” says Omonuk. “My own literary work is held steady by the artistic influences contributed by the African diaspora, and is thus inseparable from the legacies of other Black and marginalized artists across all of time and space. It is through the echoes of their voices that I have now come to understand why the great Maya Angelou echoes ‘I know why the caged bird sings.’ Thank you!”
In “Copalli Kinship: Mesoamerican Metaphysics as a Foundation for Relationality with Other-than-Human Entities,” Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato “map[s] copal’s enmeshment with various human and other-than-human entities,” both in the context of Mesoamerican religiosity and in critical engagement with the copal collection at Harvard’s Peabody Museum. Mendoza Nunziato simultaneously celebrates the contemporary ritual practices that preserve human relations with copal and challenges museum administrators to rethink their own relations with colonial legacies and with the more-than-human world.
"I humbly receive this prize with and for my family and ancestors,” Mendoza Nunziato says. “I’m so honored and grateful to my thesis advisor Professor Mayra Rivera and TF Kythe Heller for their support and encouragement as I found my voice, and to Professor Davíd Carrasco for paving this path and helping me connect to the Mesoamerican past. I truly feel that copal has drawn me into this relationship and research, and I am honored to be on this journey, which I will carry forward during my doctoral work here at Harvard.”
—HDS Communications