A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor students can receive in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Jurors choose portfolios by high school seniors whose works best represent the Scholastic Awards’ judging criteria: originality, technical skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice. These remarkable artists and writers will each receive a $10,000 scholarship.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2022 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are Trini Rogando and Hayden Brashear.

Trini Rogando

I would like readers to understand [that the works in my portfolio are] a cohesive collection of pieces about the female queer experience, and how queerness inherently does not need to be confined to constructed definitions—just like a poem.

In English Class, My Girlfriend Discusses The Great Gatsby

POETRY

Trini Rogando, Grade 12, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Alexandria, VA. Gold Medal Portfolio, Alliance for Young Artists & Writers Writing Portfolio Award

There, sitting with our English desks circled
wide, the air volleys light in fizzing character.

Gay. Old. A boring romance, like all books. Your
lone determinations swing out broad-shouldered,

clamoring the gala of our classroom with posture.
This is so useless. No one really cares about reading.

The room’s maw snarls wild, arguments whittling
opinion to a single bloody point, and I find, then,

carelessly—in each hand a huddled pistol, in each
throat a license to kill. Gunmetal rhetoric is what

drives strength forward, why we never yield soft
in concession, how we don’t recognize ourselves

in the drunk women that refuse to claim guilt. Like
Gatsby, I at once desire this pride and am removed

from it. Among your condemnations of that goddamn
simp, those pick-me queers, yourself the one you fault,

I closet my lips shut and reserve all judgment. You’ve
said: our class can’t know how we chart out our futures

together, lying illicit in the foggy dusk. I know. But it all unwinds
before me now. In those sinful American dreams, we’re

the fullest and the richest, the beautiful fools, we’re the ones
throwing those absolute motherfucking ragers, the best—

and only the best—of Jordan and Myrtle and Jay. Hand-in-hand-
on-wheel, our fingers burn juniper and we touch awash with

infinite hope. Society’s secrets just roadkilled in the yellow dirt. Both
of us unhidden, gentle and glitzed, driving on towards death—

if only you could learn your surrenders sooner. Read, see, I want
to say. Time reaches out at the end of the dirt-slate dock;

a hundred years of ceaseless wanting holstered in this book.
Is that the memory you will clutch close? Listen, see. There

are green lights dangled on the tips of our teeth. A deliverance
that can taste so much like each other. Love, see. Let us learn

to show it now. Like Nick, I pretend I’m not careless—
I beat on against the current, swallowing the past.

Hayden Brashear

It is important to me to understand the interconnectivity between places and people as well as the greater impacts and trends of local problems.

I first find a new location that I have never visited (often randomly, based on places I see that interest me). Then explore the area, sketch multiple angles of the location and take photographs. These sketches and pictures are combined digitally into a single collage reflective of my perception of the place I visited. I research issues important to the location and decide on a secondary media that connects to these problems.

This concentration aims to promote my comprehension of an area on both a physical and conceptual level, connecting landscapes to larger environmental, socioeconomic, and political issues through my process and materials. This is achieved through a combination of sketching en Plein air, digital collage, and environmentally based material (e.g., fire, hand-made charcoal, water pollutants, etc.) representative of my experiences and impressions.

Featured images: Hayden Brashear, 39.74, -104.99 and 39.67, -105.52, Drawing & Illustration. Grade 12, Denver School of the Arts, Denver, CO. Gold Medal Portfolio, Blick Art Materials Art Portfolio Award

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