Year One is the College of Wooster's first-year literary magazine, featuring a collection of the best original poetry, prose, essays, photography, and artwork submitted exclusively by first-year students. The Chief Editor of Year One is the Writing Center intern, who assembles a staff to compile and edit the works each year. Each volume of Year One serves as an exciting showcase that enables us to look ahead to the many more wonderful works that these students will produce throughout their careers at Wooster, and indeed, their lifetimes.

Over the Summer of 2006, incoming first-year students were asked to read Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, and to prepare a short paper answering the following question: “Which one character in the book did you find most disturbing and why?”

Once these essays were submitted to each student’s FYS instructor, the essays were reviewed and ranked in a blind critique, the top ten essays from the entire first-year class were selected, and the authors of those essays were invited to have dinner with Azar Nafisi after her campus-wide Forum presentation in September 2006.

These are the winning essays.