Amellia Hausmann and Zelda Godsey-Kellogg 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 some of their winning works.

Amellia’s portfolio contains paintings that evoke a sense of nostalgia and warmth. She does this by “finding each specific color that’s created by shadows both in the fabric and face without using blacks and greys, because I believe finding the blues, yellows, and purples rather than a flat grey in a shadow truly brings each piece to life.” Zelda’s portfolio is filled with memoirs that were written during the last two years of high school. These works from their past and present show how they have “developed and grown as a writer.”

Amellia Hausmann

“I deliberately chose watercolor because it made more sense for me to use this medium rather than colored pencils because you can use it to cover a larger space and focus on the broad image, but also refine it to the small details and highlights to accentuate the details that make the whole picture great. My overall goal within this portfolio was to utilize the interesting colors and shapes that bright, direct sunlight creates against fabric to create beautiful, nostalgic scenes that, even if the viewer has never experienced the scene, transport them to a warm, familiar environment.”

Zelda Godsey-Kellogg

“One of the things I’ve learned as I continue to write is that I need to take risks, not for the sake of making a piece more professional/presentable, but for fun’s sake. I need to have fun with my past, to poke at it and myself for reacting the way I did while simultaneously fundamentally empathizing with the way I reacted. I need to try new things and fail at them, otherwise, how am I supposed to become a better artist?”

(Im)print(ed)

Zelda Godsey-Kellogg, Personal Essay & Memoir. Grade 12, Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities, Greenville, SC. Gold Medal Portfolio, The Cora Bidwell Writing Portfolio

If you start from the start, which you are, as of now, doing, you could be anywhere. A swamp, a city, a ditch, a small cottage, etc. There is this idea that time is like a mountain, with its own valleys and peaks, and I can visit whatever point I so desire. Meaning, there are so many men I could’ve been if one pebble never tumbled down and got stuck in my shoe. David Foster Wallace (plus any other pretentious writer worth their salt) would posit something insignificant here, or in the following few lines, and you’d forget about it until much later, when you start to reflect. You think, Hey wait a second, didn’t he say something about this earlier? Isn’t there something here that makes something else make sense?

This is the reencountering of experience. Experience is, in its event, not a poem. It has no grammar or breath to it. It goes on and leaves a small wake behind it, which gets lost in other such wakes. It is only many years later you see how the tide meets the shore.

Here, think of this piece as a snowball. Or maybe the long end of an e-cigarette puff. (That’s how you know this is contemporary.) Start with the pull; then quick breath; soft holding; and finally, release. (It’s sweet, no? Gets you from one night shift to the next?) And, of course, this is all a grand metaphor. Or likely a journal entry. A captain’s log. And I’m documenting me and you’re documenting you documenting me and we get tired of documenting don’t we.

That one summer two years back, I slept on my brother Conner’s floor and he’d make jokes occasionally: if my back was aching, I should be more appreciative of his hospitality, and maybe that’d set the vertebrae right. Stuff like that. (I was perfectly appreciative of his hospitality. I’m writing about it, aren’t I?) I would argue that period in my life was not dissimilar to a house cat’s, in that life was a hand ringing a bell: Now Is The Time For Sleep, Now Is The Time For Shitting, Now Is The Time For Eating. I was probably fifteen, sixteen—nothing more to me than the cage of my scrappy chest. (Yet, on top of me lay every version of me trying to be something else. On top of me lay the boy who really, really wanted to be loved, but did not know what that might look like.)

If you’ll notice, ladies and theydies, the interspersing of long sentences between the fragments. The long sections and the short sections. The language picking up or slowing down. (What is given the light of day.)

We played games at Wal-Mart that summer, Conner and I. Like, we kicked basketballs at each other from across the aisle. Think of Wal-Mart as something to get out of bed for, an excuse to stunt my high-tops. Maybe I’m confusing the summers. (See, one year was a terrarium for the other. Meaning, it held all the moss of the year ahead of it, but not the trees or fish.)

Here is my essay. I think you understand why I love the common—my brother and me, the common. We do common things and we are common and nothing shines about us. We are rubbing and rubbing the sides of ourselves for something to shine, but we are common. (Common things don’t shine. I’ve given much thought to metal.)

This is just an observation. But maybe the reason I care so much about breakfast, even though I don’t eat it anymore, is because I used to eat it so much at Conner’s. Like, there are very few experiences similar to the smell of coffee the morning after a rough night. (And how I couldn’t weigh the gravity of one night without remembering the nights that came before.)

The people keep saying, “Remember my intent! I never intended that!” (Then go and use the same pink hand soap they’ve always used, neglecting to apply the lessons they’ve learned). The people talk and talk of the degradation of the sentence. The sanctity of the sentence. What does it mean to say something coherent anymore, or to live in the age of science and technology?

I appreciate and I appreciate and appreciate. (I am so appreciative. I am in a state of perpetual appreciation.) If you would like me to appreciate you, I recommend you do something terrible to me—at least once. There is a litany of bad-halfbad things to choose from. Bring a hand close to my face, then buy me Chinese. After you do it, whatever it is you chose to do, it is vital you buy me something, or perform some other such nicety, else I will not appreciate you.

(Oh But You’ve Got To Hear What I Have To Say. No, No I’d Say Really I’m Indiscriminate. If You’re Doing A Bad Thing, It’s A Bad Thing. Simple. End Of Discussion.)

As if I don’t know what I’m talking about. I loved living with my brother—his Mario Kart trash can, his enthusiasm for Minecraft when he drank a little too much, how he woke me up at five in the morning some days to make me wash the car with him.

And yes, there were many Wal-Marts before the one I now conjure for you. My brother and I, we were once very different from the men we are now, but also, we were always going to be different. My brother and I had the time before the roads of our lives diverged (re: all my poetry is about my mom’s death), but what does it do to try and get back in the driver’s seat of memory. To squeeze blood back into our heads, to un-shatter/re-shatter our skulls.

I am sick with anxiety. I shake. I don’t do homework. I am inarticulate. I eat one day, the next I don’t. I take showers when I take them. I keep my blinds closed. Here, however, meaning this page, I am beautiful. Here, this page, I create. I clean my plate, wash the dishes, and take out the trash. I am alive for one second then two then three then so on and the shock of it never stops. All there is to know I realize I no longer know. What do I say? There is food on the table in my poems and the bad-halfbad things happen less and less. Or maybe more and more.

If I were to enter that conjured Wal-Mart, I would find nothing. (Which is worse than finding old fear, old anger.) I would find nothing to nurse. I am the phosphorus in the lights (and that is all). I go to eat something (and that is all).

Dear brother, I have mentioned you. I once watched as your voice grow softer and softer with the bleak tug of remembrance (re: death). Now, you talk so much. Have you missed something? Do you miss mom, like I do? Are you worried for this country? Are you worried for me? (Everyone seems to worry for me.)

If you, the reader, love your brother, you should mention, at some point, a small story involving the town the two of you grew up in. You may only know The One Story™, but nevertheless, share it and emphasize its smallness. Recall the baby alligators lounging on rocks with great detail. Spikey, green, beady. They looked like driftwood! And I wanted to know what it felt like to ride a log down a stream so I tried to hop on top and then . . . Ask him if he has any similar stories. He will either share or not share, or half-share. You may be at a party and there is a possibility someone interrupts and offers him a joint or a beer or, if you are younger, a stick of gum. There are many situations that may arise. This is to say, today I have decided to make a story of my brother. For my brother. I have made a story and he is in it. He is in it because I have captured him. I have taken the thumb of experience and gotten its print. I have made us, here. Big in our smallness. Small in our bigness. Desperately trying to make ourselves over. To push against our own wakes, hoping that, many years down the road, we will be able to recognize the tide as it meets the shore.

Featured image: Amellia Hausmann, Colorful Breeze, Painting. Grade 12, Hutchison School, Germantown, TN. Gold Medal Portfolio, Jill and Peter Kraus Art Portfolio

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