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 Samantha Aikman and Lily Arnold.

Samantha Aikman

My writing process has changed over this past year. Since the pandemic, my motivation to write has diminished and I have felt less inspired. I have accepted that my consistent writing schedule and process may never be the same as it was before the pandemic, so I have become more relaxed about when I write and I’m less uptight about which poems I share.

To the Fig Tree on Kalocep Island

POETRY

Samantha Aikman, Grade 12, Mt Mansfield Union High School, Jericho, VT. Gold Medal Portfolio, Cora Bidwell Writing Portfolio Award

When I say “fig” 
I do not mean the kind 
you get at the supermarket
in a clear plastic tub. 
I do not mean the kind
that is shriveled, and brown, 
and crackles when cleaved open
by a child with dirty nails. 

When I say “fig”
I mean the kind that dangles,
purple and glowing 
from a thicket of foliage 
above a cobbled street. 

Have you ever stood 
at the edge of the Adriatic 
under the shade of a tree 
as old as a country 
and eaten the pith of a fruit 
the color of the sky at dusk?

What is this sudden urge we call longing?
When, in the late afternoon 
of a Saturday in January, 
as I loiter under the fluorescent lights 
in aisle six, I demand to have the heart 
of a past summer on my tongue. 

I buy a box despite them being old and dry,
and stand with my fingers in my mouth 
at a bus stop on the corner of Dorset,
halfway around the world from a tree
that has not likely been long lost to sun. 

Consider the heat.
Consider the distance, and the toil, 
and all the time
it takes to deliver life (first to the palm and then to the lips). 

Since when has fruit never 
been enough of a reason to return?

Lily Arnold

In my portfolio, I chose to explore and express my Asian American identity, as well as the broader Asian American experience.

As an adoptee, I grew up in predominantly White Spaces. For my first linocut piece, I wanted to express my feelings of separation and alienation by representing myself as an outlier that doesn’t fit the pattern of my other white peers.

My mom once told me a Chinese proverb about an invisible Red Thread—a thread that connects us all to the ones we love. Even though I was born across the world, a thread had always connected us. I wanted to physicalize this proverb by having separate hands coming together, connected only by a thread. I chose crochet to symbolize our lives being interwoven; and I repurposed plastic grocery bags not only for reasons of sustainability, but also to represent the idea of finding beauty from something seemingly mundane.

Featured images: Lily Arnold, My Identity (Mixed Media) and White Spaces (Printmaking). Grade 12, Franklin High School, Franklin, TN. Gold Medal Portfolio, Alliance for Young Artists & Writers Art Portfolio Award

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