Spanish MA Student Makes History with UCE National Literature Prize

Winner of the 2024 UCE (Universidad Central del Este, Dominican Republic) National Literature Prize, Scarlet Sánchez Contreras is a first-year master’s student in Spanish at Baylor University. Her debut short story collection, Diez pájaros de piedra (Ten Stone Birds), earned one of the Dominican Republic’s most prestigious literary distinctions, awarded annually by the Universidad Central del Este. The jury praised the book for “the clarity of its prose—clean and effective—allowing readers to enter the stories with ease,” and for “the author’s creativity in constructing diverse and heterogeneous scenes and characters.” Scarlet is the youngest recipient in the prize’s 23-year history. 

Originally from San José de Ocoa, Dominican Republic, Scarlet is a fiction writer, poet, and lawyer. She holds a Master’s in Creative Writing from the Valencia International University and Grupo Editorial Planeta, and her work has appeared in literary magazines, anthologies, and newspapers. She was selected by Páginas de Espuma and Jorge Volpi as one of twenty Spanish-speaking authors under forty featured in the anthology Encyclopedia of Tlön, and earned honors in both short story and poetry at the Festival Literario Sur 2024. She is also the author of the children’s fantasy novel Castel Blanc: Los guardianes de la luz (2023). 

Scarlet came to Baylor drawn by its commitment to humanistic education, creativity, and literary research—values she believes will strengthen her literary career and prepare her for future work in higher education.