Kate Vieira, the Susan J. Cellmer Distinguished Chair in Literacy and a professor with the School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, recently won the Kay W. Levin Award for Short Nonfiction from the Wisconsin Writers Awards.
The award was given for Vieira’s Guernica Magazine piece, “Someone Else’s Language,” published in June 2022.
“Someone Else’s Language” focuses on Vieira’s experience teaching with the Peace Corps in Latvia in 1999. She discusses primarily the language barrier between her and the Latvians, and how it influenced her experience. The article is subtitled, “What learning Russian in Latvia taught me about history, politics, and figures of speech.”
“It’s never language itself that creates conflict or, for that matter, builds peace,” Vieira says. “It’s people who chose to use language, that intimate and uniquely human resource, as a blunt weapon of colonization. And it’s also people who say the collective words that allow them to meet, as best they can, the awful exigency of their moment.”
Throughout her experience, Vieira reflects on her identity as an American, as a foreigner, and more when interacting with others in Eastern Europe.
Vieira asks: “What is close and what is far? Who is us and who is them? At the malleable age of 22, when I agreed to live and work for two years in Latvia without yet being able (I admit) to locate it on a map, I believed my time abroad would transform me into someone with clarity, perspective, a specific and coherent identity. But what I learned was that once you start speaking someone else’s language — once you welcome it into your body, once it becomes a filter for your everyday heartbreaks and cups of tea — your identity becomes more diffuse, not less.”
As a first place winner, Vieira received $500 and was awarded a five-day writing residency at Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts. There will be a free reading and celebration at the Arts and Literature Laboratory in Madison on Saturday, May 20, at 6 p.m.