Groton Students Win 21 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards

Five Groton students have earned a total of 21 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, receiving regional recognition for their creative work. Those who won gold keys, the highest distinction, will now compete at the national level.

Sophie Baker ’16, Yanni Cho ’16, Gina Kim ’15, Ethan Woo ’16, and Derek Xiao ’15 were among the 2015 Scholastic Art & Writing Award winners. Students in grades seven through 12 are eligible to enter in any of the 28 categories, which range from painting and short story to digital art, fashion, and science fiction. The juried panelists, according to the award website, “look for works that best exemplify originality, technical skill, and the emergence of a personal voice or vision.”

Two Groton students won writing awards. Ethan Woo won a gold key in the “Flash Fiction” category with an essay entitled, “Here is the Boy Who Didn’t Know,” and Sophie Baker earned gold for a poem, “The Last Light.” Ethan also won two silver keys in the Short Story category, as well as two honorable mentions in Flash Fiction.

Ethan wrote "Last Meal," a silver key winner, for a Groton English assignment in which students were told to emulate Hemingway's style. His honorable mention, "Seven Thousand," followed an English class prompt to emulate James Joyce's “trademark epiphany moment.”

Sophie wrote “The Last Light” for a Groton assignment that required students to write poetry using a limited vocabulary of about 200 words. Her poetry was inspired in a museum, by “a series of Flemish primitives that depicted the Last Judgement,” she says. “I changed the poem a little bit when I submitted it to the competition, adding words of my own to achieve a deeper sense of the biblical reference.”

In the visual arts, Derek Xiao won five gold keys for his charcoal drawings; he also won two silver keys and one honorable mention.

Gina Kim earned three gold keys and two silver keys for her multimedia creations. Her favored theme: growing up. “Some of them represent the innocent and unfiltered stage of childhood, some represent the transition in between, and some represent the loss of such innocence,” she explained.

Yanni Cho won two silver keys for paintings, including “Prayer,” which was inspired by a photo of Yanni as a child, praying with her parents. “My mom would tell me that it was a time to talk to God, but I didn’t know whom exactly I was talking to or how I was to carry out a conversation in my head without anybody answering,” she recalled. “In the painting, I used a dark background to show the silence when praying and how I feel that I’m by myself. The awkward expression on my face, drawn realistically with oil, depicts my uncertainty.”

Congratulations to all of Groton School's Scholastic Art and Writing Award winners!

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