Abby Sexsmith, a third-year Alfred University student majoring in history and music, delivered the 2026 Wit and Wisdom lecture at the April 23 Bergren Forum.
The lecture is delivered annually by an undergraduate recognized for excellence in student writing, either scholarly or creative, and oral presentation. The honor is bestowed under the auspices of the Alfred University chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest honor society.
Gabriella Rodriguez, also a junior, received runner-up honors.
Abby’s lecture was based on an essay she had written for a Fall 2025 creative writing class taught by English Professor Susan Morehouse. The essay, “A Dictionary on Handling Dead Bodies,” was composed in the abecedarian form, in which its 26 paragraphs each began with a word beginning with a successive letter of the alphabet. Additionally, Abby’s essay employed a weaving technique in which three separate themes or narratives were juxtaposed against each other: recollections of the Catholic funeral rite for her late grandfather; development of an art project that would involve the arrangement of a dead animal’s bones; and recollections of her Catholic instruction regarding death at the St. Ann’s school in Hornell, where she was a young student.
Additionally, Abby’s lecture included a review of funeral rites and traditions from around the world. In general, she says, she found those practices more devoted to the concerns and survival of the living than to the final ends of the deceased. Modern rituals honoring the dead evoke, she said, “a slow goodbye.”
Abby’s essay “A Dictionary of Handling Dead Bodies” may be submitted for publication to literary journals in the future; therefore, in the interest of protecting her current copyright, Alfred University Enews will not publish the piece. In the event of its future publication, Enews may share a link to the publishing media.
