Perpich News

Literary Arts Celebrates 2023 Minnesota Regional Scholastic Writing Awards

January 27, 2023

Perpich Literary Arts students and staff are celebrating another year of Scholastic Arts hard work and success!

We are very pleased to announce the 2023 Minnesota Regional Scholastic Writing Awards! Congratulations to the Perpich Silver Key and Honorable Mention award winners and our inspiring faculty!

Perpich 2023 Regional Scholastics Writing Awards – 11 awards received
  • 4 Silver Key awards
  • 7 Honorable Mention awards

Kevin Lally, Literary Arts Instructor, said, “I’m so excited that these talented writers are getting the recognition they well deserve. It is such a privilege and an honor to work with them!”

Gold Key works automatically advance to national judging. In New York City, renowned creative professionals review Gold Key works from across the country. Jurors select work for national recognition based on three criteria: originality, technical skill, and emergence of a personal vision or voice.

PERPICH ARTS HIGH SCHOOL 2023 MINNESOTA REGIONAL SCHOLASTIC Writing AWARDS RECIPIENTS

SILVER KEYS:

  • Mia Tamez: Silver Key for Poetry wicked game
  • Rowan Hilden: Silver Key for Personal Essay & Memoir A Journey Through Childhood Grief
  • Rowan Hilden: Silver Key for Short Story Sculpt
  • Rowan Hilden: Silver Key for Short Story Adam

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

  • Mia Tamez: Honorable Mention for Poetry fall flesh
  • Alana Brandt: Honorable Mention for Poetry Russian Roulette
  • Rowan Hilden: Honorable Mention for Science Fiction & Fantasy A Cat and A Cauldron-Stirrer
  • Rowan Hilden: Honorable Mention for Short Story A Baker’s Snowfall
  • Rowan Hilden: Honorable Mention for Flash Fiction She is a Constellation
  • Addy Miller: Honorable Mention for Personal Essay & Memoir Pawprints
  • Addy Miller: Honorable Mention for Short Story A Letter for Your Thoughts

Excerpts from award winners

Mia Tamez (Literary Arts 2023) said, “I’m glad to achieve one of my goals for senior year!”

wicked game, Mia’s Silver Key poetry piece

 

Visceral comfort will bring me curling

Back to you

Trees clatter together 

Like bones in a fox den

The snow will swallow me whole 

As will my thoughts

 

I was born to be bathed in candlelight,

Swaddled in sweaters,

Prone to a crow’s call,

Often to be seen 

With something red on my lips

Kept aflame

By the intestine-twisting

Scent of you

 

What a wicked game

A hollow winter night plays

Shadowed by the fume of vanilla and spice

 

You will find me here, 

Waiting at the bottom of the bookshelf,

Awake, stalled only by the thought of you

 

Forest green of sweet bergamot and old books,

Warm breath in a snowy sky

Gold rings caught between the pages

Knitted sweater in the middle of a winter storm

Kind, moon-like spark in your eye,

Blessed by Artemis are you.

 

Oh visceral comfort,

All the beautiful things about you

That I have yet to know

And might never

Aquí nadie se salva

Salvo que seas tu mí lugar.

Rowan Hilden (Literary Arts 2024) said, “Submitting to Scholastic was a really different experience – I’ve never done anything like it before – but between workshopping pieces, writing in classes, and support from friends, it opened me up to see where writing can really take you.” Hilden received awards for several short stories. Here is the introduction from Sculpt.

Sculpt, Rowan’s Silver Key short story piece

“Like a letter opener to the heart, our story starts as it explodes into a million fragments of sense-memory, a wistful undertaking of half-wishes and truth-tellings. You have made it here, the moments of your life colliding into one another, dominos click-clacking, picking up speed right up to the moment when your consciousness spills into these words on this page, reading them in your head, hearing them spoken aloud. You are here, you are here now and there is nothing, nothing that could ever change that in this moment. Stretching time into thinning milliseconds couldn’t save you.

You understand, now, the panic of a world in which you are powerless. You live in it.

You understand, now, the sculptures.”