Sigma Tau Delta is an International English Honors Society founded in 1924 at Dakota Wesleyan University. Today, they have over 700 chapters at different universities and work to foster high achievement in English language, literature, and literacy. The 2025 Sigma Tau Delta Convention is themed ‘One of Ours’, after Willa Cather’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

In October, members of Whitworth’s chapter of Sigma Tau Delta submitted to the convention with the hopes of being selected to present their papers, creative works, and research projects in Pittsburg this March. And in December, nine students’ hopes were answered. Whitworth is overjoyed to have such a large showing for the size of our chapter and university. 

Three Whitworth Presenters:

Melinda Mullet, one of the students who participated in the 2024 Convention, submitted a Creative Nonfiction piece. In her own words, “My essay is about my great-great-grandmother, her experience with sexual abuse in her conservative Mennonite community, and her resiliency, all set against the landscape of eastern Montana. This piece began two years ago in Environmental and Natural Writing with Dr. Nicole Sheets, but it wasn’t until a 6-word sentence exercise in Dr. Peter Moe’s class last semester that I found my way to the ending I wanted. I turned my six-word sentences into a poem – an “icon” and braided together other portraits of other Mennonite women whose stories have informed my own.”

Caleb McGever submitted a critical analysis paper, “Silence, Secularization and Scripture in Waiting for Godot.” Written originally for Dr. Casey Andrews’ Irish Literature course, “The paper looks at Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot and analyzes the ways the characters use Christian language to find meaning in existence. The characters don’t seem to believe that the Christian language their ancestors have given them to talk about existence has any truth behind it, which leaves them in an existential spiral where they struggle to find meaning in general. I argue that their Christian vocabulary lost its original meaning because it doesn’t resemble their experience, but the language is still useful in the long run because words gain meaning as you use them.”

Kaitlyn Hawker submitted a short fiction piece called “Temperance.” Written originally for Professor Jerusha Emerson’s creative writing course, “Temperance” takes a look at the same two minutes from four different sets of eyes, with each switch in perspective gaining a little more information for the reader. How each character interprets the world around them changes the reader’s perception of the event that has just occurred. The piece asks how we would pay to keep a secret and how far we would go to maintain the status quo.