ANN ARBOR—Five University of Michigan students split $4,350 in prizes during the summer term Avery and Jule Hopwood Awards in Creative Writing and the Marjorie Rapaport Award in Poetry contests.

The awards are among the nation’s oldest contests for student writers, supported by a bequest from Avery Hopwood, a 1905 U-M alumnus and successful Broadway playwright, and Jule Hopwood, his mother.

The winners are:

Summer Hopwood fiction contest:

• Joya. McCrory, class of 2008 College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, English major from Detroit, for “On My Way and Other Short Stories.” $800.
• Paul Fiehler, class of 2008 LSA English major from Pittsburgh, for “Gettysburg.” $1,000.

Summer Hopwood poetry contest:

• Claire Smith, class of 2008 English and American culture major from Naperville, Ill., for “Middle-West Mornings and Mountain Afternoons.” $1,750.

The Marjorie Rapaport Award in Poetry:

• Melissa Kim, class of 2009 Residential College English major from Huntington Woods, Mich., for “The Peking House.” $300.
• Sarah M. Sala, class of 2008 LSA English major from Brooklyn, Mich., for “Proof by Design: The Calculations Involved in the Dynamic of a Natural Wind.” $500.

This award is a gift in memory to her daughter from Phyllis Rapaport. The terms of this gift also stipulate that the poems “shall exemplify the new, the unusual, and the radical.”

The 76-year-old Hopwood program has awarded more than 3,000 prizes since it began in the 1930s. Past winners have included Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller—who won his Hopwoods in the 1930s—and Elizabeth Kostova, whose 2005 novel “The Historian” became a best seller.

Other Hopwood winners have gone to produce famous films such as “Body Heat,” “The Big Chill,” “The Shootist,” “Where the Boys Are,” “The Misfits,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Superman” and the more recent “State of Grace” that starred Sean Penn.