Raise Your Glass: Two Adroit Students Named 2015 Presidential Scholars in the Arts

Congratulations to the brilliant Oriana Tang and Christina Qiu on being crowned 2015 United States Presidential Scholars in the Arts yesterday evening. Both are recent graduates of Livingston High School in Livingston, New Jersey.

From the website: “The U.S. Presidential Scholars Program was established in 1964, by executive order of the President, to recognize and honor some of our nation’s most distinguished graduating high school seniors. In 1979, the program was extended to recognize students who demonstrate exceptional talent in the visual, creative and performing arts. Each year, up to 141 students are named as Presidential Scholars, one of the nation’s highest honors for high school students.”

An alumna of the 2014 Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program (where she studied Poetry under founder & editor-in-chief Peter LaBerge), Oriana was selected by judge Richie Hofmann as an Honorable Mention for the 2014 Adroit Prize for Poetry, and now reads prose submissions. In the fall, she will be attending Yale University. Her poetry and prose have been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom, and Bennington College, among others. Recent work appears in The Best Teen Writing of 2014, PANK, The Sierra Nevada Review, Winter Tangerine Review, and Killing the Angel. She currently serves as a Prose Mentor for the 2015 summer mentorship program, and has been named a 2015 Presidential Scholar for Writing (Poetry and Short Story).

An alumna of the 2014 Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program (where she studied Fiction under prose editor Kaitlin Jennrich), Christina was selected for the Editors List of the 2013 & 2014 Adroit Prizes for Prose, and was subsequently selected by judge Alexander Maksik as an honorable mention for the 2015 Adroit Prize for Prose. She has also been recognized by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Awards, and the National YoungArts Foundation, and has received the Princeton Prize in Race Relations. She has been published or is forthcoming in Bartleby Snopes, Winter Tangerine Review, two issues of The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Her short story “Lucy At Home” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She will be attending Harvard College next year. She currently assists with the 2015 mentorship program, and has been named a 2015 Presidential Scholar for Writing (Short Story).

We’re pretty sure this is the first time in the history of the Presidential Scholar program that two students from the same non-charter, non-arts public high school have been named Presidential Scholars for the same writing sub-genre.

They basically crushed it.