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George Mason student Noella Mongony has received second prize in the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics essay contest, the Elie Wiesel Foundation has announced.

As part of its evolving research residency program, the Provisions Research Center for Art and Social Change—the research arm of Mason Exhibitions—continues to develop experimental initiatives grounded in open, interdisciplinary dialogue. Conceived as spaces for collective inquiry, these conversations serve as catalysts for academic research, exhibitions, and other creative practices.

In celebration of ten years since the establishment of the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at Geoge Mason University, the center brought together international artists in a week-long festival titled “Imagining Sanctuary” to discuss craft and to reflect on the artist’s role during history’s challenging moments.

In May 2026, Cheuse Center board member Katherine E. Young’s translation of Akram Aylisli’s People and Trees (Plamen Press) was named one of three finalists for the 2026 European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) Literature Prize. The winning author and translator will be announced on 2 July at an awards ceremony at the EBRD’s headquarters in London. 

For the past few months, I have been carrying with me a book of haikus, or near haikus, by the Japanese poet Sayumi Kamakura, translated into English by James Shea. Applause for a Cloud, published last year by Black Ocean press in Boston, begins with these lines: 

In Greece’s Chinatowns, I saw Chinese immigrants traversing the streets but not in a flashy red-lantern-golden-gate-fortune-cookie-boba-drinks type of way but in a more waking-up-at-the-crack-of-dawn-and-opening-up-shop-and-smoking-a-cigarrette type of way. The Chinese immigrants in Greece were more lowkey. I was thinking this when I walked through the streets in the summer of 2026.

When I spent the summer in Portugal, everyone told me the street I lived on was dangerous. But in the daylight, the area appeared innocent. Clothing lines strung from neighboring windows, trash bags and cans filled with evidence of mundane lives: beer bottles, diapers, and old linens. From the view of my window, I could see a small woman pull laundry from the line and a man in his mid thirties lounge after a day’s work. My street smelt like cigarettes and in the early evening they sounded of laughter, shouts, and spitting motorcycles.

I met Kwiatkowksi over a series of events in September and October of 2025, as he traveled in the US with the Cheuse Center at George Mason University and Yale University. Grzegorz Kwiatkowksi is the Cheuse Center’s Visiting Writer from Poland, and the center is collaborating with him on a series of events that mark the tenth anniversary of the Cheuse Center, founded in 2016. The center was named after Alan Cheuse, whose father was a Jewish refugee to America, from Stalin’s Russia (now Ukraine).