Award Winning Entries for "Celebration of Writing Day," May 2, 2002

- Essay -

Reflecting Upon America's Poverty
By Tessey Jose
Tens of millions of people are hungry each night, including millions of children who are suffering disease and malnutrition. In New York City, one of the richest cities in the world, there are children who live below the poverty level, deprived of minimal conditions that offer some hope from a life of misery, deprivation and violence. Although there is no apparent solution to the problem of poverty, the underlying rationale behind poverty in our country can be linked to several social factors. From careful consideration of Jonathan Kozol's Amazing Grace and Lisa Dodson's Don't Call Us Out of Name, it is evident that poverty in the United States is due to the lack of financial stability, opportunity, and moral principles.
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- Creative Writing -

Exit Thirteen
By Kendra Griffin
Nestled into the curve of every highway exit are the memories of a child turned grown-up. The pieces and parts tumble into the downward whorls and collect at the bottom like the barefoot-stuck pebbly remnants of a lakeswim that won't be washed down the drain. You can sift them for gold. Everything is there -- the rotting boards stabbed into the trunk of the clubhouse oak, the forbidden night raids across the neighbors' fields, the putterings of young genius minds over hook and pulley ideas. The hours spent shaking two percent milk in a margarine tub in order to make butter. The shaving cream and Windex potions. The stolen gingersnaps. The never-filling penny jar. The cricket hunts, the first brave plunges into early summer swimming lessons, and the disillusionment over sea monkeys. All these memories find themselves tangled in the grass-filled hollows that tremble at the passing of eighteen-wheelers.
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Fingerprints of Family
By Melanie Chopko
In the earliest of images that blink before my brain like a slide stuck in its projector, I cannot take my eyes from the think lines which quiver as they stretch across the stubby carpet of a dark room. The filleted blinds, each strong and confident, are a testament to an attempt to create comfort as I sit in my grandpa's lap, my bare calves itching from the brown gauze of his polyester pants. He wears these pants in each of the square photographs from his jaundice world, Arizona, and when he walks behind my thoughts, the first memory shadowing every memory to come.
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In Response to Looking Outside My Door
By Melissa Sutton
The sun whispers a crawling day,
raises its arms
and shouts a hello,
with rays
that fall
and patter
on heads down below
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Eat Bread and Salt and Always Tell the Truth
By Donna Bryan
When you are a young student you don't know that the truth doesn't always come from books. You don't know that what you learn in a classroom is contoured in context, is sometimes delicately polite, aggressively dogmatic, or nakedly untrue. Your innocence translates as deference, you want to believe, you need to believe, you are an acolyte and your teachers demigods. You are the faithful supplicant awaiting an epiphany from the pedagogical deities.
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