Personal Essay Competition 2024 Winners Announced

Congratulations to the winners and finalists of our Personal Essay Competition! These teen writers mined their memories and navigated a range of powerful topics, from a family dealing with grief, to the peace found in nature, to the intertwining of art and science. Read the winning pieces below, along with commentary from Guest Judge James Marcus.

WINNER:

‘A Letter to Ms. Cohen: Musings on Polyethylene’ by LCorvus (United States)

Read the piece here, or log in/sign up to read it on our site (for writers aged 13-19).

Vladimir Nabokov once said that a writer should have "the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist." Both of these qualities are on ample display in ‘A Letter to Ms. Cohen.’ The author is exhilarated by the metaphorical merger of poetry and chemistry. Indeed, we are told, language and matter are inseparable, "two strands of human creativity intertwining and dancing together." The sentences themselves dance their way across the page here, with impressive agility and a light sprinkling of footnotes, and they are a pleasure to encounter.

RUNNER-UP:

'19 Hand' by Cord (Canada)

Read the piece here, or log in/sign up to read it on our site (for writers aged 13-19).

The death of a grandparent is often the first great sorrow in the life of a young writer, and an inevitable topic. Yet something unusual transpires in the sweet and subtle ‘19 Hand.’ There is no audible mourning from the author or their father. Instead, the two play a hard-won game of cribbage, which is perhaps a way of evading grief but also a way of bearing it together. The essay shows great control, nuance, and a feeling for how human beings get through the most heartrending moments.

BEST PEER REVIEW:

Unpacking Perfectionism Through Theatre Education, reviewed by Sasha Harden (United States)

Log in/sign up to see the winning peer review on our site (for writers aged 13-19).

In her consideration of Abigail Judd's essay, Sasha Harden did what a critic is supposed to do: she discussed the broader themes of the piece (including the brutal price we can pay for perfectionism) while looking at the actual language with a jeweler's loupe. It's hard to do these things simultaneously. One task demands a gift for generalizing, the other a deep attention to detail. Harden has both, and she knows that metaphors really do matter!