Delaney Sullivan’s essay was selected as one of the best PhD essays and Allie Moore’s essay won the year’s “Master’s Student Essay Award”.
Two English department graduate students have been recognized by the Children’s Literature Association. Delaney Sullivan’s essay was selected as one of the best PhD essays and Allie Moore’s essay won the year’s “Master’s Student Essay Award”.
Of the significance of these awards, Dr. Tharini Viswanath (she/her), Assistant Professor of Children's and Young Adult Literature, remarks,
“The Children's Literature Association's Graduate Student Award is both prestigious and highly competitive; the recognition of two of our graduate students this year speaks volumes about Allie's and Delaney's scholarship and their commitment to children's and young adult literature.”
Delaney Sullivan, M.A. (she/her), is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in the English Department, pursuing her doctorate in English and American Literature a Ph.D. She is a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Assistant Director of the First-Year English Program. She is also Editorial Assistant for the Critical Studies in Media Communication Journal and has recently added a Certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies on to her program of study.
She did her undergraduate honors thesis on queer coming-out bildungsroman at the University of Florida, and earned her master’s degree in English with a concentration in children’s literature from Kansas State University, where she did her final project on the feminist potential of anti-democratic systems in young adult narratives. She has been a member of the Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) for three years.
Her prize-winning essay is entitled, “Power, Materiality, and Ideology: The Ethics of Food Anthropomorphism in Children’s Picturebooks.” The essay analyzes four picturebooks that feature anthropomorphized food characters—a fruit or vegetable (and even a fish) which have near-human characteristics and have thoughts and feelings like real children. Sullivan comments, “I question the potential ethical implications of these types of food-body metaphors. In essence, I argue that even though the imbue of human qualities might imply more agency or power, as materiality would normally suggest, that is often countered by these implied children having less agency over their body, and instead adult/child power binaries are sustained.”
Sullivan also notes that “this essay came about as the result of work I did Professor Tharini Viswanath’s children’s visual narrative’s course last Spring. I want to stress that Prof. Viswanath was an invaluable mentor and advisor as I wrote and edited this essay and was actually the professor who nominated me for the award (and is also my exam committee director).” Sullivan will be giving a shortened version of this paper at the 2026 ChLA National Conference in May.
Allie Moore is an English literature student and graduate teaching assistant in the M.A. program at USC. Her research interests include Children’s and Adolescent Literature, Comics and Graphic Novels, Gender Studies, and Popular Culture.
Her prize-winning essay is entitled “‘I can't tell them what really happened’: Analyzing the Layers of Trauma and Gaps Within Speak: The Graphic Novel.” Moore’s essay focuses on the graphic adaptation of Laurie Halse Anderson’s award-winning novel Speak (1999) and discusses the graphic form’s representation of sexual violence and trauma. Speak tells the story of Melinda Sordino, a high schooler who stops speaking after being raped. As the novel progresses, Melinda vaguely mentions the rape, struggling to process what happened to her as rape while distancing herself from the incident. Readers, too, are kept in the dark as incomplete information from Melinda’s fragmented writing leaves out information.
Readers might expect Speak: The Graphic Novel (2018) to give additional information because of its visual nature. Moore, however, contends that while “the narrative relies on images to discuss Melinda's experience…the trauma itself is kept secret from both characters and readers through gaps in and between panels.” Moore expands, “my paper discusses how the gaps not only highlight Melinda’s inability to process the rape but also the readers’ understanding of the narrative.”
Moore also has nothing but praise for “my wonderful advisor, Dr. Viswanath, who nominated this paper,” initially a smaller draft of Moore’s thesis. Moore remarks, “This paper is something that means a lot to me. Not only is it a part of my larger work and research that I've been able to do at USC, but it is also about a novel that I have been so fascinated by since I first read it in undergrad. I love close reading and writing papers but also have a passion for teaching. My undergraduate degree is in English with a teaching certification, and I have taught in secondary education classrooms before. As a result, I was required to take a YA literature course during my undergraduate studies. This course was my first introduction to Speak: The Graphic Novel. I found this novel so powerful and important as it handled what would be considered a taboo topic with such carefulness.”
Through her MA, Moore, she says, has “found a love for not only teaching at the college level, but pursuing research, which has led me to apply for conferences. The ChLA award represents a culmination of my personal love for YA literature and my newfound passion for researching sexual violence and mental health representation in YA literature.”