A Gold Medal Portfolio Award is the highest honor teens 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.

Jaden Poole
Fleming Island, FL
Dav Pilkey Portfolio Award

This portfolio explores body horror as a visual language for questioning comfort, identity, and the fragile limits of the human form. Each piece begins with something familiar—an arm, a joint, a mouth, a limb—and then shifts into a version of itself that feels both possible and unsettling. I curated these works to operate together as a single investigation: not simply to disturb, but to reveal how quickly the body can become unfamiliar when one detail is pushed too far.

My process is intentionally tactile. Working with clay, both polymer and low-fire, allows me to sculpt forms that feel soft, swollen, or strained before they are hardened into permanence. I leave subtle textures—finger marks, stretched areas, torn edges—because they emphasize the physical act of shaping something that feels alive. When painting the surfaces, I avoid glossy finishes that would make the pieces feel decorative. Instead, I use matte or layered tones that mimic bruising, tension, or rawness. These choices help the sculptures sit in the space between biological realism and surreal distortion.

In curating this series, I focused on transformation rather than gore. The horror comes from implication, not spectacle. A joint becomes a mouth, a limb splinters into multiple functions, or an ordinary body part bends until it questions its own purpose. Each piece stands alone, but together they follow a progression—from mild unease to full bodily reimagining.

What I want viewers to understand is that the work is not about fear; it is about curiosity. Body horror becomes a lens for examining vulnerability, adaptation, and the strange beauty found within forms that do not behave the way we expect.

View works from Flesh and Fragments, Jaden’s award-winning portfolio, via our online gallery.

Adelaide Sendlenski
Brooklyn, NY
The New York Times Portfolio Award

My academic pursuits have increasingly merged with my creative endeavors. This year, studying Latin and Ancient Greek has become a wellspring for my poetry. As I translate stray lines from the Aeneid and the Odyssey, their rhythms echo in my mind, nudging me to reshape their characters and themes through a modern lens. One afternoon, I found myself feeling that visceral connection again—this time, to Penelope’s wit, her unshakable presence, and even the quiet resistance behind her weaving loom. Before I could even close my Greek textbook, I was sketching a poem in the margins, unraveling her story while tracing the tension between duty and selfhood.

As my study of Greek deepens, I’m increasingly drawn to subverting classical texts, peeling back their layers to uncover voices (like Penelope’s) that have been buried within centuries of retellings. This poetic excavation has led me to many writers, but two in particular have left a mark: Margaret Atwood and Anne Carson. Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Circe/Mud Poems prompted me to embark on a poetry collection that explores poetic subversions in response to my own modern-feminist translations of Ancient Greek texts. This in turn inspired my poem Circe’s Lament, dealing with the intersection of girlhood, familial trauma, and friendship loss. And then there’s Anne Carson’s Bakkhai, a faithful companion since 10th grade English. Carson’s interpretation of the Bakkhai inspired me to weave together ancient narratives and contemporary experience in poems like First/ πρῶτος, which explores the god Dionysus as a figure of unmitigated emotion, embodying the timelessness of human feeling. Beyond my classical mythology studies, I was consistently inspired by the manifestation of girlhood in my own neighborhood, Fort Greene and its interplay in New York City, exemplified in the poems City Girls and nocturne for the fort greene girls. I sat on benches near the tennis courts, walked the dog trails around the back of Fort Greene Park, and sipped many an iced latte at the pea green coffee shop across the street from my house when delicately crafting these poems. By threading together classical study, feminist retellings, and the everyday textures of my own neighborhood, I’ve discovered a voice that lets ancient echoes and modern girlhood reimagine each other.

View works from Fatherly Feeling, Adelaide’s award-winning portfolio, via our online gallery.

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

Featured image: Jaden Poole, Carpal Chasm, Ceramics & Glass. Grade 12, Fleming Island High School, Fleming Island, FL. Educator unavailable; Northeast Florida Scholastic Art Affiliate, Affiliate. Gold Medal Portfolio, Dav Pilkey Portfolio Award