Creativity, curiosity and extraordinary storytelling are on full display in the winners of the eighth annual Synapse Storytelling Contest, with this year’s honorees transforming experiences in medicine, science, nature, identity and everyday life into memorable works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and photography.
From a haunting story of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic to a deeply personal examination of medical language, from the courtship dance of western grebes to poems exploring generosity, human connection and the ways we navigate uncertainty, this year’s winning entries showcase the breadth of creative talent across the UCSF community.
Synapse is thrilled to announce this year’s first-, second- and third-place winners and honorable mentions in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and photography.
Fiction
First place: “These Days, Who Knows?” by Sophie Kakarala
A story that transforms the ordinary anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic into a quietly devastating work of literary fiction takes top prize in this year’s fiction competition.
“These Days, Who Knows?” builds suspense from seemingly mundane moments: a broken refrigerator, a pot of homemade stew, an elderly neighbor who doesn’t answer her door, and an inexplicable trail of ants. Through restrained, elegant prose, these details accumulate into an unforgettable portrait of isolation, community and helplessness during one of the most uncertain periods in recent history.
Rather than relying on dramatic twists or sentimentality, the story trusts its characters and its readers. Gloria, the elderly downstairs neighbor, is rendered with remarkable warmth through a handful of carefully chosen details, while the narrator and roommate Zoey navigate the emotional and logistical challenges of lockdown with humor, compassion and quiet resilience.
Every scene advances the narrative, and every detail ultimately contributes to a conclusion that is both surprising and inevitable.
Second place: “K the Martian” by Alex Tudoras Miravet
“K the Martian” stood out for its wit, imagination and emotional nuance, using an inventive science-fiction premise to explore enduring questions about identity, prejudice, acceptance and belonging.
A young Martian is born with a green pimple on his forehead, an apparently innocuous difference that carries a complicated history. As K gradually discovers what that difference means to others, the story explores how stigma is learned, inherited and embedded in institutions, even after its origins have faded from collective memory.
Humor and playful world-building make K and his strange Martian society immediately engaging, while darker references to lists, persecution and historical silence give the story surprising depth.
Particularly effective is K’s evolving relationship with his own identity, from barely noticing his difference to embracing it and questioning why society assigns such significance to it.
Third place: “I’m Chinese, Not Chinese” by Anonymous
A sweeping multigenerational story about war, displacement and cultural identity, “I’m Chinese, Not Chinese” stood out for its historical scope and emotional resonance, transforming one family’s fragmented history into a poignant meditation on what identity means when home becomes a place that can no longer be returned to.
The story moves across nearly seven decades, from wartime Wuhan and Communist-era Shanghai and Guangzhou to the family’s eventual arrival in the United States. Through a series of sharply drawn scenes, the story traces how political upheaval scatters one family across countries and generations while fundamentally altering its relationship to home.
Moments of war, persecution and migration are rendered with restraint, allowing the cumulative weight of the family’s history to emerge without sentimentality.
At the heart of the piece is a deceptively simple question posed by a child: “Why aren’t we Chinese?” The grandfather’s response — “Because we can never go back” — crystallizes the story’s exploration of exile and belonging.
Honorable Mentions
“Mid-Life PhD Crisis” by Nikhita Kirthivasan
The funniest submission, with an exceptionally strong and distinctive voice. Its sharp observations about graduate-school life, running jokes and escalating absurdity make “Mid-Life PhD Crisis” highly entertaining.
“Soul Animal” by Nikhita Kirthivasan
A clever, sustained extended metaphor comparing PhD students to raccoons. “Soul Animal” has warmth, wit and a wonderfully playful voice, with particularly effective observations about academic life.
Nonfiction
First place: “What’s in a Name?” by Leona Hariharan
A deeply personal exploration of how medical language shapes diagnosis, treatment and patient understanding has earned first place in this year’s nonfiction competition.
“What’s in a Name?” uses intellectual ambition, graceful storytelling and originality to transform one patient’s experience into a powerful meditation on medicine’s capacity to revise not only its language, but the stories it tells about the people it treats.
The essay traces Hariharan’s experience with polycystic ovary syndrome from a diagnosis at age 16 through years of navigating its reproductive, endocrine and metabolic effects. Along the way, it reaches back to the condition’s medical history, weaving scientific developments into a compelling account of what it means to live inside medicine’s evolving understanding of disease.
It is exceptional in synthesizing memoir, medical history and systems thinking. Its central insight that in medicine, “names are maps” illuminates how diagnostic terminology can shape what physicians notice, which specialists provide care and how patients understand their own bodies.
Hariharan adeptly connects changes in medical knowledge to real-world consequences, while maintaining a thoughtful and deeply human perspective.
Second place: “Sign-Out” by Saffanat Sumra
“Sign-Out” stood out for its graceful prose and thematic cohesion, finding profound meaning in an ordinary clinical ritual and ultimately reframing the ache of goodbye as evidence that something mattered.
It begins with the familiar hospital ritual of handing patients from one medical team to another, then gradually expands the idea beyond clinical care. Patients recover and leave, rotations end, teachers move on and relationships that briefly felt permanent dissolve. Through these transitions, the author discovers an unexpected truth: even happy endings can carry the weight of loss.
Particularly effective is its exploration of medicine as a succession of temporary relationships in which knowledge, responsibility and trust are continually handed forward. The essay also draws on the Sumra’s childhood experiences navigating healthcare after immigrating to the United States, giving the idea of “handoff” deeper personal significance.
Third place: “Beyond Paradise” by Payal Hedge
“Beyond Paradise” is richly observed examination of food, culture and colonial legacy in American Samoa. It begins with the idyllic image of Polynesia familiar from popular culture, then moves beyond that picture to reveal a more complicated reality.
Through observations of life on Tutuila, Hedge explores a food system in which fresh produce can be scarce while imported, processed foods are abundant, connecting those conditions to colonial history and significant public health challenges.
The essay stood out for its ambitious blend of personal observation, historical context and health reporting. Most compelling is its refusal to reduce food solely to a question of nutrition. Instead, Hedge shows how meals also function as expressions of generosity, community and cultural belonging.
That complexity gives the essay its power: cultural traditions remain strong even as the ingredients available to sustain them have been reshaped by forces beyond the island.
Honorable Mentions
“Carlo, and the Question of Who He Would Have Become” by Therese Santiago
A deeply moving personal essay about grief, memory and the loss of unrealized possibility. Its greatest strength is the juxtaposition of Santiago’s present happiness with the life her cousin never had the opportunity to experience. The writing is intimate and restrained, culminating in a simple birthday message that gives the piece considerable emotional power.
“The Value of a Cheese Stick” by Jessica Greven
A vivid and compassionate account of providing street medicine in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. The sharply drawn patient portraits are particularly strong, bringing individuals to life through memorable details while preserving their dignity. The essay’s attention to small gestures — conversation, clean socks, wound care and an extra cheese stick — offers a warm reflection on how trust and human connection become essential parts of medical care.
Poetry
First place: “A Thursday in Trivandrum” by Payal Hedge
In “A Thursday in Trivandrum,” Hedge takes us on a cab ride in Kerala. As the cab fare grows, so too does our narrator’s courage to learn more about the driver. When the ride is finally over, we are left to make sense of the lessons learned on this trip.
Hedge uses structural pauses to call attention to the fleeting moments that convey complex emotional interactions. In learning that the driver’s wife is extremely ill, the narrator exchanges a glance with her mother: “I knew that look. It was the same look that has quietly rearranged our lives for strangers more times than I can count.”
Many phrases will surely resonate, particularly as students interacting with patients and their loved ones daily.
Second place: “Butterflies and Salt” by Deepa Rajan
In “Butterflies and Salt,” Rajan introduces us to an anxious narrator conducting research on butterflies in the Amazon Rainforest. From the beginning, she grounds us in two simple truths: “I like butterflies and butterflies like salt.”
The further we get from these truths both in the structure of the poem and at the narrator’s campsite, the deeper the narrator gets into a cycle of “I worry” statements before ultimately returning to what grounded her in the first place: butterflies and salt.
Third place: “On Time” by Esperanza Padilla
“On Time” offers a thoughtful meditation on our relationship with time, contrasting the pressure of deadlines and productivity with a gentler vision rooted in nature, community and everyday pleasures.
Through vivid imagery and playful moments, the poem asks what might happen if we stopped treating time as something to control and instead embraced it as “a companion” — something to experience, cherish and share before it passes.
Honorable Mentions
“Dear Depression” by Bivas Nag
An intimate and candid confrontation with depression that gives difficult emotions a direct addressee. “Dear Depression” offers vulnerability, emotional immediacy and willingness to articulate an experience that can be difficult to put into words.
“Midfield” by Marli Berry
“Midfield” draws a compelling parallel between soccer and medicine, using the role of center midfielder to explore teamwork, resilience and responsibility. Its sustained metaphor captures the uncertainty, sacrifice and sense of purpose underlying medical training.
“The Whole Thing” by Sarah Li
“The Whole Thing” is a moving meditation on routine, purpose and mortality. Through recurring images of nature and everyday life, the poem gradually reveals how seemingly ordinary moments accumulate into a life whose meaning emerges in retrospect.
Photography
First place: “Partners in Motion” by Craig Sutkin
A beautifully timed wildlife photograph capturing the synchronized courtship display of two western grebes wins this year’s top prize.
“Partners in Motion” stood out for its graceful composition, sense of movement and accomplished wildlife photography, transforming an extraordinary courtship ritual into a memorable image of two animals moving, for an instant, in perfect unison.
The photograph freezes a fleeting moment of remarkable coordination as the two birds move together across the water. Their near-perfect symmetry gives the photograph an almost choreographed quality, while the movement of the birds and water conveys the energy and speed of the display.
Sutkin succeeds with exceptional timing, strong composition and technical precision. Capturing this behavior requires patience and careful observation, and the results preserve both the elegance of the ritual and the dynamism of the moment.
The accompanying caption provides valuable natural-history context, helping viewers understand the significance of the behavior and adding another dimension to an already compelling image.
Second place: “Morning Above the Pyramids” by Leela Mohan
“Morning Above the Pyramids” carefully balances composition and evocative atmosphere, capturing not simply an iconic destination but the distinctive experience of encountering an ancient landscape from above at dawn.
The image presents a sweeping sunrise over the ancient city of Teotihuacan, Mexico from a dramatic aerial vantage point, with a hot-air balloon providing a striking foreground element against the monumental pyramids and expansive terrain below.
Mohan uses thoughtful composition, beautiful use of natural light and ability to convey both grandeur and tranquility. Layers of landscape and architecture create a strong sense of depth and scale, while the soft morning light gives the scene a quiet, atmospheric quality.
The accompanying caption provides useful context for the experience and setting, complementing the visual storytelling without competing with the image itself.
Third place: “Breakfast at Dawn” by Craig Sutkin
“Breakfast at Dawn” achieves in combining photographic skill, patience and storytelling to turn a brief encounter between photographer and wildlife into an arresting image that is at once beautiful, intimate and quietly dramatic.
A young great horned owl with its early-morning meal and wide-eyed gaze immediately commands attention, while the prey in its talons transforms the portrait into a story of survival, independence and the rhythms of wildlife at dawn.
The sharp focus and effective use of natural morning light reveal fine detail while preserving the atmosphere of the encounter. Its composition draws attention directly to the owl without sacrificing a sense of its environment.
The accompanying caption adds valuable context, explaining the young owl’s stage of development and emerging ability to hunt independently, giving viewers a deeper understanding of the behavior captured in the frame.
Honorable Mentions
“City Hall Thursday” by Analiese Batchelor
A sophisticated architectural photograph that balances the grandeur of San Francisco City Hall with the smaller human moments unfolding within it. Strong framing, symmetry and scale transform a familiar civic landmark into an intimate and visually compelling scene.
“Double Exposure” by Lina Lew
The competition’s most inventive photograph. The unexpected merging of Yosemite and San Francisco’s Chinatown creates a dreamlike image of two distinctly California places. What began as an accidental double exposure becomes an evocative exploration of place, memory and photographic experimentation.
“Monarch of the Park” by Victoria Li
A graceful wildlife portrait of a great blue heron that demonstrates careful observation and composition. Natural framing and a softly rendered background isolate the bird beautifully, capturing both the elegance and commanding presence of a familiar Bay Area species.
