Brianna Blue and Grace Gomez-Palacio were both awarded the highest honor in the 2021 Scholastic Awards: the Gold Medal Portfolio Award! Keep reading to learn more about them and to view their winning works.

Brianna is an artist whose paintings portray “[h]ome life and themes around domesticity” by showing “the dynamic relationships in a family, through a reflection of memories.” Grace feels compelled to write, and she explores “loss, wonder, and suspension of disbelief” through poems, short stories, and flash fiction.

Brianna Blue

“As I reflect and look at my own past and experiences of my domestic home life, ideas have emerged that everything is not what it seems to be. Domestic life is very complex. Although something may have a shiny surface does not mean its insides hold the same value . . . Throughout my portfolio I have played with conceptional realities of domesticity. There is a dreamlike scene that threads through many pieces. The dream scenes bring forth innocence as well as a disconnect in reality . . . Color is another aspect that I like to play with in my paintings. The colors blue and red are a representation of the warm nature of my family and the environment I live in. Throughout my paintings, the colors are blended slightly creating an ethereal and flowing feeling. I have found different ways to skew the reality throughout each piece whether it was through perspective or a repetition of elements. By repeating elements or skewing the perspective I’ve assigned symbols of femininity while creating a mood of reminiscing in each piece.”

Grace Gomez-Palacio

“These are thoughts, emotions, and tortured little ramblings that I had to put into words or die unsatisfied, and I’m only sort of joking when I say that. The main themes here are nostalgia, memoriam, and the little bits of life that stick to your teeth like rock candy. It’s mostly written in all-lowercase—that’s an unfortunate side-effect of being the type of kid who read Romantic poetry at age eleven, sorry—and there’s a lot of shameless autobiography going on in every piece. Roman numerals are used rather liberally, as well as italics, as well as metaphors that make about a half-teaspoon of sense. That is to say, there’s feeling in here. The big ones are loss, wonder, and suspension of disbelief, and they’re all deeply, desperately mine.”

remember me after i die as a girl who was careful with candles

Grace Gomez-Palacio, Poetry. Grade 12, David H. Hickman High School, Columbia, MO. Gold Medal Portfolio, The Harry and Betty Quadracci Writing Portfolio

i.
all i do is write in lowercase and wish i spoke spanish.
proper spanish too, not the textbook kind, not the shit that gave me the highest score on the ap test, but the kind with slang and stories and little tiny mirrors propping open the faces of all the real mexicans i’ve ever met.
i upturn my hands and braise them in marigold petals, i offer you conchas and sopa de frijoles negros and polmorones, i burnish under the summer sun and tell myself i will earn it.
i think of a world where my dad kept the accent in our apellido, kept it hard for my school teachers to say aloud, kept it special and syllable-rich, but i can’t, exactly, blame him for changing it.
i see what they say about people like my grandfather on the news.
even so, even yet, hyphenated and hobbled, i fell in love with the way my chilean coworker read it aloud from my nametag. it resonated on the insides of my ribs, her lips over my name like that.
where are you from?
let me stumble to explain to you, please. allow me to try and confess myself.
and when i do—
when i do, i will gentle my hands against the curves of our ofrenda, and i will ask my grandmother to forgive me, to encircle my arms wrist to shoulder in ghostly glamour.
i alight and arrive and i do not spare a single drop; the countertop glows with wax-furbished light and someone, somewhere, is at least a little bit proud.
maybe this, here, this sting of unsent emails that eases under the eyes of spirits i don’t believe in, maybe this is why i have to keep churning out blood cells and book bindings from the marrow in my bonestuff. maybe it’s because i’m going to paint our house robin’s egg blue, and dissolve it in illumination at the beginning of november, and someday i want someone to do the same for me.
maybe it’s not about the spanish and the pan de muerto and the postcards she sent me from italy.
maybe, maybe—
it’s about fire.
it’s about the cautious cremation of the wick, the slender balance of fragrance and fraudulence.
it’s about smothering the smoke before it spreads, preserving your capillaries in amber.
it’s about the melting and the catching and the crying-behind-your-hand type of summers.
plead your praying hands into the hollows of a record player, and
remember me after i die as a girl who was careful with candles.

ii.
all i do is wear headphones and pretend i know how to draw.
real life drawings, too, the kind that i would show off in math class to the girl who sat next to me, the kind i sketched on the inside of a cardboard coffee cup sleeve and a girl i never met told me it was beautiful.
i think i could do it.
i think i could feed my statistics homework to the things in my fish tank and draw people that don’t exist until the bones of my fingers mangle and subside.
i wear headphones, foam over ears over skull, and the volume of flight seems something reachable. press it higher. press it higher. press it—
music and music and misery, i inhale fermatas of college town air, of oxygen recycled and rebuffed and reorganized into the bureaucracy of my lungs. i pull seashells from bookshelves and grind them into something like sugar, or diamonds. i tangle my fingers into the hair of a bowstring. i bedazzle the ceiling with pomegranate seeds. i steep the ashes of your love letters into a tea and honey myself on the tongue of their incredulity.
where are you from?
this, i want to say, helplessly. radio dials and ipod-camera shutters and the shape of optimism played easy on guitar. more than that. less.
the sun sets as though it is painting its nails and i draw it the way a person asks for permission.
there is a brush of thumbpads on plastic where buttons are pressed, and playlists are wrung out like laundry, over and over and over. there is a flash of a match and my window ignites. the room wisps with lavender-scented smog and the house does not burn down.
let me request this. just this once.
beg of me my conscience, and
remember me after i die as a girl who was careful with candles.

iii.
all i do is wake up and wear boy clothes like it means something.
cliché, whisper the tags that read Mens, the threads of polyester that make the shape of my hips something shameful. pronouns and pyres, lamplight in the morning and bread stacked into monuments—religion looks a little bit like a woman,
and a little bit like a crown.
to worship and wonder in equal, opposite measure, to devote myself to something other than the shadow of her, to walk myself backwards into hell holding her hand, to sing in the kitchen at breakfast.
i sleep in a safety that yearns to be broken.
where are you from?
anywhere. somewhere with a ceiling i can paint on and houseplants that are more immortal than your breath. a place and a person and the sensation of kissing someone and feeling right, from the only way i knew the other answers were wrong, before.
let me type this.
push me by the shoulders to knock on god’s favorite little door, tell me to hand over this sheaf of paper that spit itself reluctantly from the dregs of my typewriter’s last ink ribbon, and i’ll do it. i will.
i will boil the water on the stove and vacuum the carpet into nothing, i will dust the mantle free of its gravity and smash the porcelain disappointment of a girl who thought she had to marry a prince into memory.
i’ll yank collars out-and-over crewneck sweaters in the mirror, and pray to the glass that i am beautiful, i will roll the word handsome on the back of my tongue and it will taste like anticipation.
my head fills with wedding dresses.
my fingertips catch on the pull of the lighter, but i do not falter, the flame wavers and wilts and regrets. i stand there, surrounded, unknown, remade, pre-loved, and embering away into captive-bred starlight.
tell your grandkids about me, about my words and my eyes and my bloody little heart.
please, remember me after i die.
and, when you do,
    remember me after i die as a girl who was careful with candles.

Featured image: Brianna Blue, Immersed, Painting. Grade 12, Edward R. Murrow High School, Brooklyn, NY. Gold Medal Portfolio, The Harry and Betty Quadracci Art Portfolio

To see more Gold Medal Portfolio recipients, past and present, visit our Eyes on the Prize series.