Alumni Spotlight: Sonja Cutts '22

Alumni Spotlight: Sonja Cutts / Class of 2022

By Madison Alexander

Sonja Cutts

For our first Escribe Alumni Spotlight, we are thrilled to feature Sonja Cutts! Cutts (SMA '22, UIowa '26) served as the lead editor of Escribe Maria for three years as well as being the pioneering creator of this very website, an unprecedented development in Escribe history. Our staff reached out to Cutts to hear about her reflections on her literary arts career at St. Mary's and the impact of her Escribe involvement on her college pursuits.

About the start of her time at St. Mary's, Cutts explains, "When I got to SMA, I joined every club I could. As a student at a middle school without many extracurriculars, I had limited opportunities to explore my budding interests. So, determined to make up for lost time and express my passion for writing, I became a member of the Escribe Maria team.

The first half of freshman year, my duties mostly consisted of rating via Google Form various student submissions to the magazine. Once the lead editors had tallied all these ratings and selected pieces for inclusion, I joined the group tasked with inputting them into the magazine’s template. Though a bit repetitive, I loved this work. There was something captivating about piecing together diverse creative works into a cohesive publication.

Seeking greater involvement in Escribe Maria, I applied and was selected as a lead editor at the end of my freshman year. Over the next three years, my responsibilities grew significantly. When the other editors wanted to expand the magazine’s digital presence, I built a website and led a team of students in generating online content. My proudest moment at Escribe was publishing an over 4000-word piece of student-written fiction on that website. Prior to launching it, we had no good platform for displaying these long-form student works too extensive for our physical magazine. The website changed that.

These Escribe experiences influenced my decision to attend the University of Iowa, home to one of the country’s most renowned undergraduate writing programs. Appropriately, there are a ton of different student-run literary magazines on campus. I’m currently a part of Boundless, a literary magazine focused on translation.

One thing I wasn’t expecting to find at the University of Iowa was its strong focus on literary translation. In 2022, the school began offering a B.A. in Translation—a degree currently found at no other institution in the country. This focus on language is reflected in the General Education requirements for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where all students must take four years of a single language. For me, this meant that I had to complement the three years of Latin I’d taken at SMA with an extra year in college.

Surprisingly, those two semester-long Latin classes were some of the best learning experiences I’ve had so far at college. Though challenging at times, they deepened my knowledge and love of the language I’d started studying in high school. Moreover, they gave me something I’d wanted for a really long time: a hobby. I worry often that my mind has been poisoned by productivity and cannot relax into unproductivity unless forcibly pulled there by addictive, algorithm-driven distractions. But there is no algorithm pushing Latin towards me. Translating it is just something I enjoy doing, though it has basically zero practical purpose.

To embrace unproductivity, I joined Boundless as a Latin translator at the beginning of this school year. The rest of the translators and I recently worked with the magazine’s leaders to select student work for our spring print publication. These leaders then assigned each of us pieces to translate into our chosen languages. I just finished my first drafts of the two poems they assigned me and can’t wait to discuss them with the head of the University of Iowa’s Classics Department, who agreed to advise me on my translations.

When these translations are published alongside their original English versions, I doubt many will read them. However, my time at Escribe Maria taught me that the value of publishing lies not only in the finished product, but also the process—the collaboration, problem-solving, and satisfaction of bringing creative work to life. That journey is just as meaningful as the end result."

Escribe Maria would not be what it is today without Sonja Cutts' tenure as lead editor. Our SMA literary arts community looks forward to following Cutts' future accomplishments and creations!