Yeo Writing Prize Winners

First Place 2026

Halo, After the Fall

Amala Shaju | Research Assistant, Department of Pathology & Genomic Medicine

The sky over Wayanad had always carried the smell of wet earth—an ancient fragrance that came alive when the monsoon brushed its fingers across the hills. But that particular August, the clouds had hung lower, heavier, like some giant grief waiting to be released. I had not come here looking for beauty. I had been sent—gently but firmly—by my psychiatrist.

“You need a change, Amalu. New people, new air,” she had said. “This retreat will help you.”

Help me.

I had smiled because what else do you do when someone says that after your first suicide attempt, after a breakup from a ten–year relationship that felt like the spine of your identity?

So I packed a bag, climbed into a van with strangers, and ended up in Wayanad Heritage Resort, nestled near Meenmutty Waterfalls—a place where the mountains whispered legends and the nights smelled of cardamom and damp leaves. The resort was beautiful, but I barely noticed it. My mind was a constant ache, a heavy fog pressing against every breath. I had been hollow for months, moving through life like smoke through fingers.

The gathering was a camp for “healing through nature and community.” A phrase that made me roll my eyes so hard I almost gave myself a migraine.

On the first evening, as people introduced themselves in circles, I stayed at the back with my arms folded. I didn’t want healing. I didn’t want joy. I wanted silence—preferably eternal.

And that was when he walked in.

He was tall, slightly thin, his face glowing with a strange kind of mischief. He dropped his backpack dramatically and flashed a grin at everyone.

“Hello, hello! I am Ahaan,” he said. “Professional traveler, part-time philosopher, and accidental cancer survivor.”

People laughed. I didn’t.

He turned and looked directly at me, as if he had been searching for my face the whole time.

“And you are?”

“No one,” I muttered.

“Interesting name,” he said, taking the empty spot beside me without permission.

I instantly disliked him.

He kept talking—about how cancer had taught him that time was too precious to waste on regrets, how he backpacked with strangers to find stories, how he believed that helping others was the purest form of living.

I nodded occasionally because ignoring him felt too rude, even in my broken state.

“You don’t talk much,” he said finally.

“I didn’t come here to socialize.”

“Then why did you come?”

“My psychiatrist made me.”

He laughed lightly. “Great! Forced healing is still healing.”

I looked away, irritated. But he didn’t take the hint. He just kept chatting—tiny, meaningless things, like the shape of clouds or how the tea here tasted like childhood. I had no idea how someone could talk so much without saying anything truly important.

That night, after dinner, the group gathered near a campfire. Someone began singing ‘Oru Mezhuthiriyude…’ The melody entered me before I could stop it. It was our song—mine and my ex’s. The world blurred. My chest tightened. Every memory—the laughter, the fights, the promises, the heartbeat we once shared—rushed back like a wave I wasn’t ready to face.

Ten years. Ten years of love that had ended with one word: “Goodbye.”

I felt my breath catching. My head buzzed, and everything around me tilted. I needed air. I needed to escape. I stood abruptly and walked away from the circle, away from the song, away from these strangers and their careless happiness.

The rain had begun—soft at first, then more insistent. I walked toward the sound of Meenmutty Waterfall, the roar calling to me like an old friend. The path was slippery and steep, but my feet knew where they wanted to go.

I reached the edge where the water crashed violently below. The spray kissed my face like icy fingers. I closed my eyes and thought of everything I had lost—my love, my baby, my peace, my career. I thought of the surgery I had failed on the very day he left me… and the life that slipped away because my mind had been elsewhere.

What purpose was left for me?

Maybe the world would be better without me. Maybe I had nothing more to give.

I stepped closer to the edge.

And suddenly—arms yanked me back.

I gasped and turned. It was Ahaan, drenched, panting.

“What the hell?!” I hissed at him.

“Shh!” he said urgently. “Don’t shout. Just—just move back from the edge.”

“I don’t need your help!”

“You obviously do,” he said gently but firmly. “Come with me.”

“I don’t want—”

“Please,” he said quietly. Something in his tone wasn’t annoying; it was… knowing. As if he had already walked through that darkness himself.

I should have pulled away. But the impulse to die had vanished, replaced by confusion… and exhaustion. And I realized I didn’t know the way back.

He held out his hand. “The forest is safer if we stick together.”

I followed silently. The tree canopy shielded us from the worst of the rain. After a few minutes, he whispered:

“I want to show you something.”

I frowned, but he guided me through a narrow trail, pushing aside branches until we reached an open pocket in the forest.

And then—I froze.

Fireflies.

Thousands of them. On the trees, on the bushes, dancing like stars come to earth. The entire forest shimmered as if the night had lit candles for us.

“I haven’t seen fireflies in years…” I whispered. “Not since Kannur. They used to glow around the rubber trees after the first rain.”

“Memories,” he said softly, “are gifts. They hurt because they mattered.”

I didn’t know when the tears began, but they flowed freely. I forgot that he annoyed me. I forgot that I hated being here. For a few minutes, the beauty wrapped around me like a warm blanket.

“You know,” he said, “our pain always feels the biggest until we see the world beyond it. Then everything becomes… smaller. Manageable.”

I didn’t reply.

He glanced at my wrist. At the faint scar I tried to hide.

“You’re hurting more than you show,” he said. “But you’re here. That means something. That means you were meant to stay.”

“I lost everything,” I whispered, voice trembling. “My love, my baby, my career… I don’t know what purpose God wants from me.”

“You’ll find it,” he said gently. “And when you do, joy will follow you like these fireflies.”

We walked back slowly. Before separating for the night, he grinned and said:

“Maybe tomorrow you can have a cup of coffee with me? As a thank-you for the magical fireflies?”

I didn’t trust my voice, so I only gave him a small nod.

It was around 2:30 a.m. when the earth shook.

A rumble. A growl. Then a terrifying roar.

Before I could register anything, water and mud smashed into my room, pulling me into darkness. I felt myself thrown, hitting something hard. Then—nothing.

When I regained consciousness, there was only pain. And darkness. And the muffled sound of water rushing somewhere nearby.

I tried to move. A rock pinned my leg. My entire body throbbed. For a moment, I wondered if I was dead.

Then I heard them—voices. Crying. Calling names. I forced myself to shout.

Nothing came out at first. Then, slowly—a rasp.

A light appeared. Someone had heard me.

Hands dug through mud and debris. They pulled me out and carried me to a temporary shelter—just a tarpaulin stretched across broken beams. Around me, wounded people lay with blank, shocked eyes. I saw bodies being pulled from the soil, lifeless and covered in mud.

Twelve villages had been swallowed by the landslide. Roads were wiped out. Schools destroyed. Families gone.

This was no disaster. This was an apocalypse.

But in the apocalypse, humanity rises. People used their bare hands to dig. Strangers carried strangers. The labels of caste, religion, and age—all dissolved.

I sat up slowly despite the pain. The doctor in me awakened instinctively. I began helping, checking pulses, tying makeshift bandages, whispering calm into the ears of children.

In the chaos, I heard a voice.

“Move aside—careful with that beam!”

Ahaan.

Alive. Covered in mud but alive. He was helping rescue others, lifting debris, shouting directions.

I don’t know what came over me—I ran toward him and hugged him tightly, as if my soul had recognized its anchor.

He held my shoulders, searching my face.

“You’re okay?” he asked.

I nodded, tears spilling.

We barely had a moment before a group brought in a child, a little girl from our resort. The naughty one who had danced around the campfire.

She wasn’t breathing.

I threw myself beside her. Pressed my hands to her chest. Gave her breaths. Counted compressions. Whispered prayers.

After a minute that felt like eternity, she gasped.

She cried for her mother.

I held her close, heart shattering. Because I had already seen her mother’s lifeless body.

There were more. So many more.

Couples lying hand in hand. Children crying for their parents. Villagers digging with bleeding fingers. And through it all, Ahaan kept helping—lifting, shouting, guiding.

Hours passed before official rescue teams arrived. We were taken to the hospital. I searched for him everywhere.

He never arrived.

Three days later, back home, my parents guarding me like a fragile relic, I saw the newspaper.

Photos of those who died in the landslide.

And there—third row, leftmost—was Ahaan.

My vision blurred. The world tilted. I sank to the floor, choking on sobs I didn’t know I still had inside me.

He had been dying the entire time he was helping others, they later told me. A heavy object had struck his head. Internal bleeding had begun immediately. But he never stopped.

Not until his body refused to move.

His parents said he saved at least ten lives that night, including that of the little girl. Including mine.

“And even after death,” his mother said, voice breaking, “he donated his organs. He wanted to live helping people.”

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. My heart felt split open, raw and burning.

Why had he come into my life only to leave so soon?

I didn’t know then.

I know now.

Two years later

I stood in the same Wayanad camp, speaking to a new group of youngsters, the hills still bearing scars but growing green again.

I had moved here.

I worked as a doctor and social worker, helping rebuild the villages destroyed that night. We planted trees, rebuilt homes, started trauma–care groups, trained villagers in first aid, and revived schools. I traveled often—just like he once did—seeking beauty and bringing back stories.

Beside me, holding my hand, stood Anu, the little girl who survived that night because of him. No relatives had come forward. She had no one.

So I adopted her.

She now calls me “Mama.”

And every time she smiles, I see life stubbornly choosing to bloom again.

I looked at the young faces in front of me and took a deep breath.

“Two years ago,” I began, “I came here with no will to live. I had lost my love, my career, my child, my purpose. I thought my story had ended. But then someone crossed my path—someone who lived joyfully, fully, even though life had tried to take everything from him. He taught me one simple truth…”

I paused.

Fireflies glowed faintly in the trees nearby.

“…that happiness is not something we find in big victories. It comes quietly when we least expect it—in a stranger’s kindness, in a child’s laugh, in the chance to help someone who needs us. And when we discover our purpose—our true purpose—joy follows us everywhere.”

I smiled at the group, at the mountains, at the memory of him.

“I stand here today because someone saved me twice—once with his hands, and once with his purpose. So I’m asking you… seek joy in the little things. In helping. In healing. In living. You never know whose life you might change—even your own.”

Anu squeezed my hand.

I looked at the sky, silver with monsoon clouds, with gratitude to help me seek my bliss.

And for the first time in years, the joy inside me didn’t feel borrowed.

It felt like mine.

Second Place 2026

Typhoon Season

Sandra Yang | PGY-4 Medicial Student

The night before my grandfather dies, my grandmother sends a flurry of frantic voice messages, the rhythmic pings of my phone like the sharp sting of drizzling rain. They cause that same muted irritation, and, tired from a day of clinic, I almost don’t bother checking my phone.

When I was a toddler, I spent a year and a half in Xiamen under the care of my grandparents. During typhoon season, the sky cracks open and the ocean pours out, the angry breath of heaven rattling the windows of our little apartment. I lost my favorite little wooden stool this way–watched it as the air gripped it in its hands and swung it in a clumsy tango over the rail of our balcony. It shook and stumbled with the unsteadiness of a newborn foal, hovering for a moment before being whipped away. We searched for the pieces after, nineteen floors down. I called out its name like a lost pet, as though it might crawl out shyly from behind a tree.

My favorite memory from these dreamy toddler years is not so much a memory but a story my grandparents love to tell. It goes like this: typhoons are more fact-of-life than natural disaster in Xiamen, and so even when the sky and land become one rumbling gray, preschool stays in session, and with it my daily journey across the city. When rushing water streamed down the divots of the road, my grandfather would carry me in his arms across the street to ensure my sandals, then my feet, then my legs, then my tummy, and then the whole rest of me wouldn’t get swept away. In Mandarin, children often call crosswalks ban ma xian, meaning zebra stripes. I used to imagine the patterns along the zebra’s back were the rickety segments of a long bridge, ravenous slithering tentacles and massive crab claws snapping up between. I remember burying my face into the damp cotton of my grandfather’s shirt, hearing his laugh as he leapt deftly onto each white mark until we arrived on the other side. In those moments, I would confuse the frightened pounding of my heart for excitement as giggles bubbled over, spilling through the gaps in my teeth. I barely remember the rain.

My grandfather’s health took a sharp turn in 2022. Unable to acquire antibiotics for a simple infection due to COVID-19 restrictions, he became septic and lived sedated in the ICU for a month. With college ending and medical school starting soon after, there was no opportunity to fly to China, and I watched my grandfather fade away in what felt almost like a corrupted film reel. Through a shaky camera, I saw him get intubated, saw the tube placed percutaneously in his cheek when his osteomyelitis was diagnosed. I saw my grandmother cry for the first time.  He made what felt like a miraculous recovery, but his respiratory and cardiac health were never fully restored. His functional capacity significantly declined as his oxygen requirement rose.

When I visited my grandparents following my first year of medical school in 2023, my grandfather acquired a viral infection. I went alone, and the visit was consumed by attempts to decipher my grandfather’s medical records and convince my grandmother to take him to the hospital. I learned how to say heart failure, pneumonia, acidosis, and rales–among other things–in Mandarin. In the days in between, I rolled my grandfather’s wheelchair along the waterfront. We visited the park. I didn’t know yet that it wasn’t appropriate for him to be away from his oxygen tank for so long. When my grandparents finally went to the hospital during my second week there, I wasn’t allowed to accompany them.  My grandmother told me: “You don’t understand how the hospital is over here. It is a place you go to get sick.” It is difficult to feel like I did a good thing, even with the antibiotics in her hand, even when my grandfather got better.

Life flashed by between shaky video calls. During my third-year clerkships, I felt like I couldn’t stop watching people die. It feels trite to say I learned there is joy in the little things. That is to say–there is joy in the little things. There is joy in the time spent bringing my motherly oncology patient Vaseline for her dry lips and flaking back. There is joy in the stories about the bulldog my patient insisted she must go home to before she died. But with every small moment, I was reminded that the oncology patient had metastatic cancer and the pathology report was “very blue, and very bad.” I was reminded that the bulldog my patient raised since it was a puppy would never see her again–that while I got to see the name disappear without ceremony off my list, there would be no such announcement for her companion waiting at home.

When my elderly Hong Kong-born patient clung to my hand and told me her wisdom, I smiled gingerly at her insistence that to be a woman is to always secure a way to leave the man you were attached to. To always have an escape plan. She had reminded me of my grandmother until this moment. In my memory, my grandfather had always depended on my grandmother, and this only became more true as his health declined. When my mother bought him a bell so he wouldn’t have to keep shouting her name across their apartment, the ringing became a continuous monotone melody. My grandmother was my grandfather’s hands, his feet, and in these recent years, his breath. My grandfather was her purpose. There was no one without the other. Even with a precise escape plan mailed to her address and the door swinging wide open, she would be in the kitchen making his morning tea. 

With each passing day, my patient spoke less. When she died five days later, transitioned to comfort care as she desired, I remember only relief. I thought about a casual lunchtime comment my grandfather had made to me during high school: “If my mind leaves me, just let me die. Don’t try to save me any longer.” At that time, I had tried to laugh it off and shove a large, leafy vegetable in my mouth. He had repeated it, his voice flat and serious, before he laughed too. It felt more like a commission than a joke. As my clinical year went on, I became consumed by a slow simmering urgency that could only be tempered with each death well-died, each patient whose wishes for how they wanted to live and to pass were heard and completed.

The night before my grandfather dies, he has just returned from a less than one week stay in the hospital. He has conducted what we might call a patient-directed discharge. He wants only to be home. The hospital food is bad and the nurses are incomparable to the constant, practiced servitude of my grandmother. I call my grandmother back and she tells me he is struggling to breathe and that she is terrified. She tells me she has fed him all his favorite foods, fresh fruit, small pieces of crab, a few bites of congee. For her it is early morning the next day–the future has arrived already, and the future that hurtles towards us both is as expected as it is painful. I am tired. I tell her that he will always struggle to breathe–it is definitionally what my limited medical training tells me respiratory failure is–and that it will be okay. When I wake up, my grandmother has sent our family group chat a time of death.

The week after his passing, I dream of my grandfather in a windy field. His hair is still black and his shirt is tucked into a pair of pressed dress pants. He asks me where all of his belongings are, and I can only begin to tell him I don’t know before I wake up. I wonder if, wherever he is, he’ll find the jagged and wind-torn pieces of an old stool. It is a poor and selfish gift, and I am an incompetent Virgil, unable to answer even the simplest of afterlife questions. When the Mid-Autumn festival comes in the next few days, my grandmother tells me she cannot buy mooncakes: to allow herself even a simple joy does not feel appropriate after my grandfather’s death. For the first time in my life, I do not buy mooncakes either. I think only about burning one for my grandfather’s soul.

In our short calls between funeral arrangements, I tell my grandmother she has done every right thing. That she has not failed in her decision to bring him home from the hospital. This was the way my grandfather had wanted to die. His only request over and over–sometimes mean, sometimes pleading, always desperate and true–had been to be at home. I think of the taste of my grandmother’s cooking on his last day, the familiar smell of the bed he laid on, the salt-sticky wind blowing in from Xiamen’s shore that rushed through the balcony next to his bed. I think of the hands that undressed him for bed, the same gentle and wiry ones that he had known fifty-six years of his life. I think of the quiet. And beneath it all, if I close my eyes hard enough, there is a simmering but steady joy.

I hate it when it rains in Philly. I cannot pretend to be an eternal optimist, or even an optimist of any kind at all. I bought bright pink rain boots this year after fermenting in my socks one too many times. They are a size too big, and my feet slide around in them unbecomingly. I take big, stomping steps, and even then, my foot sometimes slips out. There is no one to carry me past the murky puddles in the road anymore. When the rain comes down heavy and demanding, the roads shift and shimmer like the muscles in a zebra’s back. When the light turns green, I leap one foot at a time onto the white lines until I reach the other side. I let myself giggle quietly, more girl than woman. I let myself buy a mooncake, a week late. I let myself enjoy the cracking of a crab’s leg just the way my grandfather taught me. I do not let the slimy tentacles or snapping claws get me.

Third Place 2026

The Joy (& Sadness) of the Magnolia Tree

Laura DeLoretta | Editor, Office for Professional Writing, Publishing &  Communication

The day they cut the magnolia tree down was otherwise an ordinary Wednesday. Except that, as I rounded the corner on my walk home from work, there was… well, nothing. Nothing except a hacked-up trunk, a jagged lightning bolt shape against the eerie twilight of the autumn sunset. 

I had been living in South Philly for a little over a year. One year filled with joy from the magnolia—basking in its shade in the summer, sweeping massive piles of leaves in the fall, seeing the stark red cardinals in the budded branches in winter, and anticipating the glorious pink blossoms in spring, which bloomed around my birthday. 

The magnolia tree was a major draw to renting this house. It stood in the backyard of the abandoned house behind ours, nearly three stories high, and was home to many neighborhood birds–house finches, mourning doves, dark-eyed juncos, cardinal lovers, and house sparrows. Even the red-tailed hawk who migrated through my neighborhood in fall perched in the magnolia from time to time. I got to know them all throughout the seasons under the magnolia, putting bird seed and suet out. It was how I became part of the neighborhood. So, when I came home that Wednesday and saw what was left of the magnolia, the branches and leaves that littered my backyard, I thought about my birds who had lost their home, and I cried.

As a child I was frequently teased for my crybaby sensibilities and how anything big or small could make me cry. To this day the right movie, or song, or words can bring tears to my eyes. As an adult I was told that this well of feeling is a gift—that you can’t pick and choose what you feel, and that ultimately, it’s better to feel everything than nothing at all. It’s awfully hard to agree with that perspective when the tears come from sadness instead of laughter. This “gift” inspired me to pursue a degree in psychology, making me (in theory) an expert in responding to sadness, anger, and fear, like the loss of the magnolia.

After the shock of the magnolia sank in, I told my husband we needed a new tree. We needed to plant a new tree in our yard to shelter the birds. One that the city can’t cut down on a whim. This problem-focused response protects me: if I could provide the birds with a new home, then there really wouldn’t be any reason to feel sad. Except that, fall isn’t the right time to plant a tree, and nothing planted in a pot could possibly grow as massive as the magnolia, and how long would it even take a tree to grow so large? Even if I could solve the problem of my displaced birds, the other facet of sadness remained—that I would never again hear the wind in the magnolia tree’s branches, never again play with my dog in the leaves that fell, and never again witness its blossoming pink flowers. What is there to do with a loss that only a time machine could reverse? 

Months before they cut down the magnolia, I noticed one bird in particular, a female house sparrow with a swollen, injured foot, who visited my birdfeeder. I lovingly called her “Little Bigfoot” and obsessively Googled what could have possibly caused this, and what I could do to help. I found that foot injuries are common in city birds. Debris like hair or string can wrap around their feet, cutting off circulation. There was nothing I could do, except hope and worry.

Time ran its course, and eventually her foot fell off completely. As I observed the backyard birds, I realized to my delight that my worries about Little Bigfoot’s survival were unfounded. Losing her foot made her one of the most ferocious birds at the birdfeeder, and she wouldn’t let the other birds come close while she was eating. She didn’t seem to even notice the loss of her foot; she merely moved forward.

The natural world offers lessons in resilience that I never found in the scientific literature.

Another such lesson came one summer day as I sunbathed on the roof deck. I heard the sudden cry of a mockingbird, and I looked up in time to see a crow steal an egg from the mockingbird’s nest in the magnolia tree. The crow perched on a telephone pole nearby, swallowing the egg whole. As I watched, tears sprang to my eyes. The male mockingbird continually divebombed the crow, who cawed haughtily and hungrily searched for another egg. I scanned the tree for the female mockingbird and noticed her, unmoving, pressed flatly against the ledge of my roof, either injured or in shock. I imagined her devastation—her nest invaded and baby devoured. I left food and water out for them, bereft at what felt like a meaningless offering when there was nothing that could bring their baby back. Nature is cruel, I thought.

The next morning, I woke up to the mockingbirds singing through my open window. I was in disbelief at the happy sound of their morning song compared to the desperate cries the night before. Tears fell from my eyes once again as I listened and marveled at nature’s ability to recover. 

The birds came back the day after they cut the magnolia down. Seven house sparrows perched on my fence, checking if I restocked the birdfeeder yet. Even Little Bigfoot made an appearance. I smiled at their persistence and their ability to just be despite the circumstances.

“The silver lining,” my husband said as we watched the birds, “is all the light coming in.” Okay, Leonard Cohen, I thought. But he was right. Without the magnolia tree, the sun pours in through the back windows. This reappraisal made the loss bittersweet. And perhaps that is the secret science of joy: a sprinkle totally changes how something tastes.

In the cold winter mornings, I keep watch over the birds. Despite (or rather, because of) the magnolia-shaped hole, light warms the kitchen. The birds chirp and sing as they make their rounds, and I dream of what to plant in spring. To remain stuck in the loss of the magnolia would go against the lesson the birds taught me: that even in the heart of sadness, there is still a song to sing in the morning.