Wilhelmina Lawerh-Lawerh ’28 recently received the 2026 Zora Award for Prose by a college student for her short story My Husband. The Zora Awards are presented during the annual Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Legacy Awards celebration.
The story examines how words can be imbued with dramatically different significance depending on a person’s life experience.
The story’s protagonist, Ayokor, is a Ghanaian immigrant to the U.S. working in a hospice facility. While there, she cares for a dementia patient who seems to have some sort of a window into Ayokor’s soul and torments her by unceasingly repeating the words that hurt her so much as a child — “My Husband.”
“Ayokor’s dad died when she was a child, and her mom remarried, and Ayokor got assaulted by her stepdad," Lawerh-Lawerh explains. “When she confronted the mom, she would defend the stepdad and say, ‘Don't talk like that about my husband.'”
As the story unfolds, Ayokor comes to understand the significance of those words to her perceived tormentor, who later in the story, we learn, has quite a different association with the words “My Husband” — the grief she constantly felt after losing him.
Lawerh-Lawerh wrote the story in a creative writing course with Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the Bryn Mawr College Reading Series, Nicole Dennis-Benn, the bestselling, award-winning author of Here Comes the Sun and Patsy.
Lawerh-Lawerh, Dennis-Benn, and her classmates workshopped the piece for several months, and when it was finished, Dennis-Benn prompted Wilhemina to submit it to different literary competitions.
"Wilhemina is a gifted writer and storyteller. A star in the making," says Dennis-Benn. "It was evident the first time I read her work — the level of maturity, originality, and character development; her vivid imagery that creates a visceral experience for the reader who she encourages to slip into the life and interiority of a complex character like Ayokor."
Originally from Ghana, Wilhelmina is a neuroscience major and is minoring in creative writing.
“There is an intersection between science and the arts,” she says. "I'm learning about different parts of the brain and how they drive different emotions. But there’s a lot about emotions that cannot be explained by science alone, writing and other forms of art can help us understand them better.”
The 25th annual Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards were held on Friday, October 9, in Washington, D.C., at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library.
