Scholastic Writing Awards

Honorable Mention

Sienna Charvel '25

Growing Up – Poetry

Annie Chian '24

On We the People / Chrome – Poetry

Zoe Flint '25

History’s Hands Divide Us – Personal Essay

Regina Flores '24

Baluartes fallidos – Personal Essay

Coco Kliman '26

Solus – Poetry

Clyde Kye '24

True and False Kings – Journalism

Love and Identity: An Analysis of Gatsby and Daisy’s Relationshipin F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – Critical Essay

Daniel Lee '23

The Great Gatsby and the Grand Glass: Two Windows into our Moral Conscience – Critical Essay

Ingrid Lu '24

Laolao – Personal Essay

Thomas Paige '24

A Father and His Son – Personal Essay

Riley Pan '24

Necrobia rufipies – Personal Essay

Kendall Rhee '24

Sleeping Sky – Poetry

Alex Tang '23

Farewell – Poetry For King and Country – Poetry

Silver Key

Sophie Alijani '24

Fitting Into the Flock –Personal Essay and Memoir

Tallulah Bates '25

Anybody want a cuppa? –Personal Essay and Memoir

Lain Biles '24

To Be a Child Again –Personal Essay and Memoir

Ella Chen '23

It Blossoms – Short Story

Annie Chian '24

How to Catch a Dream / Milk / Gaea –Personal Essay and Memoir Suffocating – Poetry

Daisy Gemberling '25 Grounded – Poetry

Shelby Kernisant '23

The War for McWilliston Theatre –Short Story

Coco Kliman '26 Half Sister, Half Gone –Personal Essay and Memoir

Ingrid Lu '24 When I was Nothing but a Thought –Poetry

Ember McMullen '25

Power and Sexuality in The Great Gatsby – Critical Essay

Jasmine Palekar '24

The Crow – Critical Essay

Kyle Park '24

Doorframe – Short Story

Everest Schipper '24

Seperation – Critical Essay

Oona Summerford-Ng '24

It’s Not “Okay” –Personal Essay and Memoir

GOLD KEY

Addie Bracher '25

My Most Prized Possession –Personal Essay and Memoir

Annie Chian '24

How to Find Your Way Through 99 Ranch Market – Poetry

Phillip Choi '26

The Pen and the Pencils – Short Story

Claire Clark '24

A Hollow Man: The Trivial Passions of Jay Gatsby – Critical Essay

Josie Frazer '24

Flying with Three Feet on the Ground –Personal Essay

Noor Harwell '24

The Virginia Opossum – Short Story

Shelby Kernisant

The Main Character(‘s Best Friend) –Short Story

Coco Kliman '26

A Lollipop Before You Go – Poetry

Ryan Lee '24

Home – Poetry

Seb Sutch '24

Nicole Teh '23

A New Pair of Glasses – Personal Essay

Enrique Perez '24 Cycles – Personal Essay and Memoir

Kendall Rhee '24

365 Visits – Poetry Becoming – Poetry

Land of the Title-less, Home of the Alcoholic: Understanding the Unconstitutional Subjugation of Modern Native America – Critical Essay Read more stories online.

By: Riley Pan '24

Necrobia rufipies

The best way to kill a red-legged ham beetle is with a floor pheromone trap. Equipped with 100 multi-species beetle disc lures and an accompanying glue board, this trap is a cemetery with all the headstones erected, waiting for the grave pits to be filled. A clear film covers the trap, such that all may view the sufferance of these creatures and find entertainment in the gauche writhing of their carmine legs. To spot an infestation, look for the pearly-white, silken cocoons that will permeate even the smallest crevices of a wall, filling them the way resin does a cavity. When you’ve determined the source, place the traps 7 feet away for optimal effectiveness. You’ll know the trap has fulfilled its task when charcoal specks litter the glue board. Still, you must watch for larvae. They produce at an alarming rate, laying upwards of a thousand eggs a year; the mothers usher children from womb to earth in numbers most creatures wouldn’t dare to think of. It is this rate of reproduction, and the vastness of their population, that makes this insect such a persistent pest. Once born, the red-legged ham beetle blooms from egg to larva to adult after just a month and burrows into the bones of your home.

Though no larger than a tooth, the beetle’s iridescent body finds its solace in rotting flesh, drawn to the dark odor of ruination. It arrives long before the elegies have been written, jaws cleaving tendon from rigid bone and tumefied skin. Like the timeless gods, untouchable and untamed, like the sturdy trees, roots long enough to wrap around the core of the Earth, and like children so young that they still feed on their mother’s breasts, the red-legged ham beetle does not fear death. Instead, it consumes death itself, bringing corpses to their final resting stage. It peels bodies like tangerines, bone freed from skin, canines sinking into the flesh. Chew. Chew. Chew. Its wings flutter as it bites down, a faint buzzing, a metronome in the distance. The red-legged ham beetle feasts, greedily consuming each morsel. It will eat well tonight.

Like the beetle’s meal, the death of our bodies, the deterioration of muscle and bone, is gory. Our flesh rots from the outside in, eating away at the vessel that has housed us for a lifetime until we are unrecognizable as anything but a pile of bones. Our skin bloats, shifting to a faded purple, our swollen joints protruding from the thick shell. Rustcolored cruor leaks out of our orifices, mouths, ears, and eyes leaking with blood. But, in tearing ourselves apart, we feed ourselves back to the nature that has sheltered us, returning to the Earth the bodies that we have borrowed.

We obsess over death, fearful of its anonymous oblivion and nauseated by its carnage. We lure it into traps covered in clear film, enraptured by the hope we can learn about it, even defeat it. But we are destined to die, to decompose until we are the ground from which flowers grow. We return to the soil we have stood on, we find peace in feeding nature, and trees become tangled in our bones. Death feeding life.