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. First up, we’re highlighting Scarlett Cai and Adiyah Parham.

Scarlett Cai

Roome Fund Art Portfolio Award 

I crafted an experimental argument on reconnection despite the fallible nature of memories, using patterns like ideas of past vs present with photographs and B&W figures and intentionally unfinished parts to show patchiness. Acting as a memory scavenger, I conducted a personal exploration of past memories, using my grandfather as a lens in navigating familial relationships. What was my grandpa like as a person, apart from the hazy recollections he told me? I sift through old photographs seeking clues of his identity and connections to other family members, using “blank”/missing elements such as the translucent transfer paper to highlight lost and forgotten histories.

Adiyah Parham

Dav Pilkey Writing Portfolio Award 

[My portfolio] is the exploration of what it means to live with a lack of religion and reassurance. God has always been a lurking figure in my life. My grandparents (whom I was raised with for a time) believe that to be without God is to be without love, and every Sunday they made sure I was showered with it. Getting up and going to church was almost as spiritually engaging as listening to a sermon. Being young and in that environment, I didn’t come to understand what kind of message my pastor was putting out until I was older, and when I did, I didn’t agree with what he said. It was a very strict “Women must be subservient to men” and “Being gay is a sin” sort of environment that I eventually grew to dislike. However, this past year, I had an interesting conversation with my agnostic mother about the idea of God that helped rekindle a bit of my faith. While I still don’t believe in all of the constructs of the Bible, this past year I’ve concluded that even if we don’t call it God or Allah or Yahweh, there’s something out there that works around our lives in mysterious ways—not always for the immediate better, but the long term good.

She Prays for Him

He sat below the portrait of momma looking as if God had traced him around her image: same chin, same eyes, same hair. Uncle Terry says the two would’ve been identical if it weren’t for his mouth. Unlike him, momma was devoted, the palms of her hands always indented from the rosary she kept on her dresser. At the break of dawn and quiet of night, she prayed for me, her sisters, my cousins, but most of all my brother: Aiden. He didn’t like church– called me a dummy for wanting to go past my eleventh birthday. But under the stained glass windows and gaze of the lord, I found solitude with my head bent in prayer.

Momma said that’s how God speaks to us, how he heals. I didn’t understand it as deeply as she did, but I tried to. The two of us worshiped to maintain our peace. My brother worshiped to satisfy his desires.

Only, his religion was at the end of a cigarette. It was with any girl he could slip his hands over. It was with a paper bag twisted tight around liquor.

“Lead him, love him, save him, God,” she would chant up at the ceiling, bare knees on the floor with her elbows pressed to the bed. Wherever she prayed, I heard her. Her voice would stain my dreams with bloody images of my brother at heaven’s gates. His body would be torn, deep cuts and pearly white bone showing from head to toe. He would yell for the gates to open, but they’d stay locked. Each time he touched their bars, they’d sear off bits of the skin from his palms, a pool of flesh collecting at his feet.

He’d smile. Stand. Yell. All before positioning his hands back over the gates.

Momma would be there too, dressed in a beautiful white gown, a gold key dangling from her wrist. She’d cry, arms held up toward the sky as she pleaded for someone to help her, for someone to stop her baby’s suffering. But she never came too close to the bars. Never looked down at her key. Her eyes would hold a mix of burning satisfaction and terror. She liked seeing him broken and yearning for the embrace of god. But he was so unforgiving in his pursuit, so enjoyably self-destructive that it disgusted her. It scared her.

In the morning, the memory of those eyes would sear into mine, forgotten in the safety of daylight and remembered in sleep.

Unlike me, momma never needed dreams to picture him as the devil or herself akin to that of an angel.

At the end of all her prayers, I would see her through the hole in my bedroom wall. Her eyes were always shut, rosary in hand, with her mouth parted open in a smile as if savoring the taste of her son’s impending salvation.

“God’ll change him, I know he will,” she would say, half expecting a hot ray of golden light to shoot down from the sky and cook some sense into my brother. But God never parted our city’s clouds with the holy spirit, and momma never thought of a way to do it herself.

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