UPPER MARLBORO, MD--Eleanor Roosevelt High School senior Charis Pannell received a Silver Key award and two honorable mentions in the regional Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the country’s largest and longest-running competition for teen artists and writers.
Pannell received the Silver Key Award for her short story, “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room,” in the Flash Fiction category. The honorable mentions were for works in the Dramatic Script and Humor categories.
An estimated 225 students received regional awards. Students in grades 7-12 submitted over 700 works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays for judging by Washington-area journalists, novelists, poets, playwrights, critics, editors and educators. This is only the second time that students from the Washington area have been able to participate on the regional level.
“We are thrilled to bring the Scholastic Writing Awards to Greater Washington,” said Kathy Crutcher, the DC Director for Writopia Lab, which began administering the program in this area last year. "This is the chance for talented, creative kids to show their stuff."
Top regional winners will be published in a collection of “DC's Best Teen Writing.” Through the Book-in-a-Dayprogram, the student writers will design and edit the collection themselves. The book will launch at the awards ceremony and will be on sale afterwards at Busboys and Poets, Politics and Prose.
Students will be honored at an awards ceremony March 15 at the Rosslyn Spectrum Theatre.
For more information about the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, visitwww.writopialab.org andwww.artandwriting.org.
To read the winning work, click here.
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About Writopia Lab
Writopia Lab is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization founded in New York City in April 2007. Writopia Lab host creative writing workshops for kids ages 8 to 18. All of the workshops have a maximum of six students and are led by a published writer who has been fully trained in a time-tested methodology. In each of the past three years, more kids from Writopia Lab have been recognized on both the regional and national levels by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards than from any other school in the nation.