Celebrating Teen Voices: January 2025 People’s Choice Award Winners

The votes have been tallied, and the winners are here! Now in its fourth year, the People's Choice Award is a teen writing contest where writers themselves decide what stands out most. After submitting their own work, teen writers explored their peers’ pieces, nominated favorites, and voted to select both a winning submission and, for the first time, an outstanding peer review. Read on to discover which story and which review were chosen by our global teen writing community, along with thoughtful commentary from the voters themselves.

It is a really creative response to the prompt… I love the way it delves into this mythological-like feel.

I think this piece illustrates how many writers feel, on and off of Write the World, writing is relief. But more than that, Write the World brought her confidence. It taught her it was okay to hurt. 

It represents what we all achieved by coming here—in the real world, we’re alone and forgotten. But now… we can talk and revel in joy.

It was a really unique way of using the prompt, and I loved the author's writing style.

The metaphor used throughout the story was so unique and effective at expressing the writer's emotions and experiences. 

This piece left me utterly speechless. 

Reading through a lot of the pieces, this one struck me as especially powerful. I love the hook at the start that immediately drew me in, as well as its creative structure, written in a stream-of-consciousness style that closes the gap between author and readership.

I love how the writer started the piece off writing and then reflected on that. 

It was like quietly stepping into the writer's life; the piece resonated with me because I found what she wrote so uncannily relatable and REAL.

I find it very relatable: how we writers get so absorbed in our work that it is real to us, and how nothing else matters when we are in our own world. The frozen world in the third paragraph (writer's block) is also something that I (and probably lots of others) struggle with as well.

While reading it, I felt like cheering for the author's accomplishments—I could really feel the emotion through the screen.

This piece is relatable and wonderful, a clever and creative literary masterpiece.

I love how the author used weaving as a metaphor for writing, as we all weave stories here. And the writing style is beautiful, and shows clearly how at the beginning, people were helping the new weaver, and eventually the weaver started helping other new people as well.

The creativity and storyline were excellent. 

The story has an intriguing start and that hooked me.

Everything about this piece feels nostalgic. Reminding me of stepping back in time in a way. 

I love how, at the end, the writer talks about helping another "weaver" with their scarf, in a full circle.

This is one of my favorite entries in the competition that I have seen! I thought it was really creative and I enjoyed reading it. 

Katrina_Smith did a really great job of this review, using a variety of different reviewing techniques to help the writer see all the strengths of their writing. This is a review that any writer would love to find waiting for them as they log onto WtW.

This review was thoughtful and insightful, but beautifully balanced constructive criticism with supportive and encouraging analysis of the piece. The reviewer wrote a very in-depth review, that I as a writer would have loved to receive.

Personally, I love just how truly immersed in the story the reviewer was. By the way they wrote it, you can just tell that the story truly impacted them. 

The peer reviewer did a really good job highlighting and praising the wonderful lines written by the author of the piece they reviewed. The reviewer also gave the author some really, really useful suggestions on how to improve their piece. 

It was so helpful! She had such a good balance of what I did right and what I needed to change and improve, and all her comments were so deep and detailed as well as thought-provoking, which challenged me to look at a sentence in a different way, or dig deeper into this metaphorical world I created. [from the writer of the piece!]