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.

Peize Wang
Harry and Betty Quadracci Art Portfolio Award
Richmond, VA

Wrestling is tough and grueling. Sports are tough and grueling. But in between the struggle and the hardships lies a temporary zen—the practice room. “The Slam Room” is a fictional name for the wrestling practice room in my school. One might certainly hear a large slamming noise behind its doors, yet one may also hear a room filled with joy, passion, competition, and brotherhood. The following collection of works chosen try to showcase all that. In the midst of all the tiring work and stereotypical ideas of what goes on in a wrestling practice room, what really occurs is an intense joy in working with brothers all in harmony and camaraderie. What your eyes will focus on is purely the subjects in the frame, and the environment they are in, reinforcing the idea that all of this occurs within “The Slam Room.” Distractions are not important in the Slam Room, and therefore the background is all black. The only light that shines is on the wrestlers within. In the end, my hope with this portfolio is that it changes common perceptions of what wrestling and sports practice are.

Brotherhood

Lillian Hughes
Harry and Betty Quadracci Writing Portfolio Award
North Charleston, SC

Nature lies at the heart of everything I write. The pieces in my portfolio illustrate the variety of ways I explore the natural world in my work. In one way, nature is a vehicle for advocacy. My poem on the rabbit at Petland communicates through negative space, a stark lack of nature and the inherent longing that comes with being removed from it. Nature provides a way for me to speak for those that cannot speak for themselves, such as the real rabbit the poem was based off of. Many times, advocating for the conservation of plants and animals is heavily entwined in the environment they call home. My bones poem details the experience of growing up witness to the endless development of natural spaces, as well as the accompanying loneliness, surrounded by a world that doesn’t seem mind. I write to preserve the green spaces that raised me, to inspire the same love for them in others. Nature is, in another sense, a way for me to understand myself. My lyric essay uses anecdotes grounded in the natural world, from geese to cats to ferns, to explore the difficulties I’ve had piecing together my own identity. In my biscuit beetles poem, I used the contrast between my childhood backyard and my current one to process the strange grief that comes with losing someone who is still very alive. I incorporate nature into my works to better know the world and how I occupy it. Even in my fiction, nature remains important. Both of my short stories take place in the forest, but the symbol’s versatility allows me to reflect the characters inhabiting the page. In one instance, the woods only reveal its secrets to Sable, juxtaposing the harsh disconnect his father harbors between both nature and his son. In the other, the forest holds a sleeping railyard, a setting that conveys both the quiet and isolation characteristic of the main character. My writing has taken me many places, delved into the world that I inhabit and the ones I conjure onto the page. Yet, no matter what the subject may be, I know the black ink of my words will always be tinged with green, that nature is as much a part of my pages as it is of me.

calcium to chemical leach

when i was seven i cracked open my femur
ike a walnut, scraped the marrow out
to patch up the playground down
the street. when the swings snapped
anyways a few weeks later, i swept bone 
powder from the chains into my
hands and pressed it into a pothole, poured in
rainwater after and waited for it to set
like concrete.

in middle school i wrung the periosteum lining
my ribs for lakewater because my neighborhood drank
that, too, stretched a driveway 
over the pond like a gravel-gray
tendon. next september the superstore bloated
and i took a spoon 
to the cartilage wrapping my fibula
and tried to feed it back
to the logged pines,
even as their sap glued my fingers
together.

in between pouring and paving, as they walk white ground 
and ignore how it crunches, i’m told the traffic
flow is smoother. i hear it’ll boost tourism, strengthen 
the local economy (that means big malls, more 
restaurants. you’re young, you want that, 
right?). they said something
else, too, but a semi went by and i couldn’t hear
it, kneeling by a guardrail with my cervical
vertebrae strung in a line, trying to thread
wet fur together again. 

presently i’m grating calcium into curbside
perennials, and when the leftover lakes and pines ossify
to a more developed haven, i’ll offer 
to mend alabaster fractures 
with my own. whatever allows us to take 
so guiltlessly, they stir it into portland cement
for a new road through the nearby
marsh. pillars into peat, wild blackberries
my mother tells me not to touch, blanketed 
in engine exhale (chemical leach, it’s part
of them now). Street corner, storm 
drain; the only bones I see around me
are my own. i watch the water
turn slick, i reach for another rib and find 
warm, empty air.

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