New Undergraduate Fellow Named

We are delighted to announce that Alexandra (Allie) Spensley ’20 has been named Princeton Writes’ 2019-2020 undergraduate fellow and Student Board chair. She will succeed Maha Al Fahim ’19, who has filled this role with great devotion and distinction during the past year.

Allie is a rising senior, pursuing a major in history and certificates in American studies, history and the practice of diplomacy, and creative writing. The high caliber of her in-class writing has been recognized by the 2017 Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence, the 2017 and 2018 Lewis Center for the Arts Outstanding Work Award, and the 2017 and 2018 Ward Mathis Prize for Best Short Story by an Undergraduate.

Outside the classroom, Allie has been active in the non-academic writing community. She has contributed to publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal and the Princeton Alumni Weekly to The Daily Princetonian and the Arch & Arrow Literary Magazine.

Her administrative and collaborative experiences include serving as a special events intern at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, the senior prose editor of Arch & Arrow, and the associate news editor of the Prince, supervising more than 50 writers. Allie looks forward to working with Princeton Writes’ Student Board to support and celebrate nonacademic writing on campus and to bring new initiatives to fruition.

Allie notes that Princeton’s literary community has played a critical part in her personal development and that “the places where I have felt a sense of belonging and ease have been indelibly connected with writing.” In her final year as an undergraduate, she is eager to “contribute to the campus environment that has so richly nurtured my own development as a writer. As chair, I will strive to recreate the sense of exploration and belonging I have experienced in a variety of writing-related social contexts at Princeton.”

We warmly welcome Allie and are grateful for her willingness to share her talents and energies with us.