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, skill, and the emergence of a personal vision or voice. These remarkable artists and writers will each receive a $12,500 scholarship.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be profiling the 2024 Gold Medal Portfolio recipients. Next up are August Moon and Celina Bagchi.

August Moon

Merson Family Art Portfolio Award

The collection of masks explores how concealing my face can convey parts of my transgender experience. My interest in masks began when I created the Death Mask for a performance art piece, Plastic Café, which aimed to bring awareness to the deadly effects of plastic pollution. The mask allowed me to act as death in the performance by aggressively throwing plastic at my classmates who wore animal masks of their own. I was interested by the audience’s shocked reactions. It made me wonder if I could alter how others perceive me to convey parts of my identity. The next mask I created followed this inquiry, and strived to communicate how “home” was a state of mind instead of a place for me. I struggled to associate home with my actual house because of my identity. To cope with feeling misplaced or estranged, I sought comfort from feelings I created for myself. The Home Mask is rooted in the concept of making the internal external, specifically how I get in my head to feel at home. I utilized a traditional home symbol to invoke ideas of home, but contrasted it by giving the house a worn, abandoned look to unsettle the viewer to draw attention to the dysfunctional connection between my sense of home and my actual house.

Celina Bagchi

Lindenmeyr Book Publishing Papers Writing Portfolio Award

The art of the written word has long been something I deeply cherish. Over the course of my life, words—in the form of poetry, stories, memoirs, and other forms entirely—have been a way for me to express myself and find my identity. [My] curated portfolio is centered around the theme of identity. It began as a poem I wrote for a Coming Out Week poetry reading at school. While I worked on that poem, I drew on occurrences and emotions from all throughout my life. I wanted to write a poem that encompassed my experience as a queer teenager learning how to define her identity. The poem I finally created ended up being the start of several others. In these poems, I explore several themes and sensitive subjects, including mental health struggles, the fluidity of human nature and character, and the meaning of the word home. To me, poetry is a way to deal with, understand, and truly experience difficult, beautiful, impactful, or even tragic events in life. Events such as these have ultimately shaped my identity and determined my core values. It is my hope that as readers take in my work, they will apply my words to their own lives. The formatting and stylistic differences between each poem are intentional; the use of different literary devices will hopefully help to set the tone and tell each individual story. This is a collection of poetry about who we think we are, who we choose to be, and who we ultimately become. Though the stories I give you have been drawn from my own life, they are not simply my stories; they are ours. The works within this portfolio are about choosing not to allow others to define us. Indeed, they are about standing in the swirling, momentous storms of our lives. And they are about the calm we find when, at long last, we defeat the storm.

Mended

“No, I thought—”
“Again and again and again—”
“Still you try—”

You never seem to finish
your sentences.
You kiss my worn fingertips and
sleep-deprived eyelids and
hope that it will be enough.

You swallow a fistful of pills to
match the whites of swollen tired eyes, begging
for release, for peace, for your thoughts to cease.
You look out of the window and I see you wonder
if the people, mere specks on the ground below
see you at all.

You leave footprints in
freshly fallen snow and
muddy trekked paths.
You wade into the depths of the ocean
waiting, it seems
for the water to swallow you whole.

You pray with your hands folded
together, porcelain breakable fingers pressed

flat against open air, facing a statue as fragile as the faith
you claim to have in it.
You stand in the storm, the clear
blue sky behind you and
a vortex of emotions engulfing you.

You smile, finally, and the world stops—
stares,
Like the sun peeking out
from behind the cover of cumulus clouds.

And when your bones have mended, you
turn to the God you promised your life, to the
love you have forsaken, to the
people you tried to leave behind and you
finally finish the sentence
you were trying to say.

“Still you try, even when you have
failed again and again and again, and your
eyes are red from the world’s cruelty, you
choose to see the beauty in canvases made of pale skin, in
hair that gleams when sunlight falls through a window pane, in
passing your eyes and earthly, fallible, temporal love
on to beings who will never understand
your tragedy.”

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