1: Nine Adroit-affiliated high school students attended the 2016 National YoungArts Week in Miami, Florida, as 2016 YoungArts Finalists.
Congratulations to Olivia Alger (Writing – Short Story), Lindsay Emi (Creative Nonfiction), Caroline Fairey (Creative Nonfiction), Ava Goga (Poetry), Ashley Gong (Poetry), Rhiannon McGavin (Spoken Word), Isabella Nilsson (Short Story), Rachel Page (Short Story), and Polina Solovyeva (Short Story). Congratulations also to the thirteen Adroit-affiliated high school students who won YoungArts honorable mentions and merit awards, and thus qualified to attend regional programs in New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.
2: We released five issues of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art.
Congratulations to Pushcart Prize nominees Kaveh Akbar, Carolina Ebeid, Marty McConnell, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Kimarlee Nguyen, and Brian Russell; Best of the Net nominees Fatimah Asghar, Alex Dimitrov, Randall Mann, sam sax, Shane Jones, Jenny Xie, Patrick Chambers, and Barrett Warner; and PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize nominees Jaclyn Grimm, Rachel Page, Anna Rowser, and Polina Solovyeva, among other Adroit nominees.
3: Three Adroit high school seniors were named 2016 United States Presidential Scholars in the Arts.
Prose editor Isabella Nilsson, Poetry reader (& previous mentorship student) Audrey Spensley, and contributor Rachel Page were invited to attend a prestigious ceremony at the White House to accept the appointment. And Rachel was also recognized as a United States Presidential Scholar in Academics, representing the District of Columbia!
4: Two Adroit students were recognized as honorable mentions for the 2016 Davidson Fellow Scholarship!
In 2012 & 2015, poetry editor Kamden Hilliard and prose reader (& previous mentorship student) Oriana Tang were recognized as Davidson Fellows in Literature! This year, blog editor (& previous mentorship student) Aidan Forster and poetry reader (& previous mentorship student) Audrey Spensley were recognized as Honorable Mentions for the scholarship.
5: Adroit students took the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards by storm, ultimately claiming an unprecedented 68 national medals. Highlights include two National Gold Medal Writing Portfolio winners (the top recognition offered!) and four National Silver Medal with Distinction Writing Portfolio winners; four American Voices (Best-in-Region) Award recipients; four Best in Grade Award recipients; and a Gedenk Award for Tolerance recipient.
To put this in perspective, approximately 2,000 National Awards are distributed each year… from more than 320,000 submissions.
6: The high school class of 2016 graduated! Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania snagged the most Adroit students this year, with five seniors headed to each. In their wake, Stanford University, Princeton University, Brown University, and Yale University each snagged three.
To view the complete list, click here.
7: Our 2016 Adroit Prizes for Poetry and Prizes, for students in high school and college, were awarded to Ohio Northern University student Rachel Cruea and homeschooled high school student Brynne Rebele-Henry.
Click here to view the total results of the 2016 Adroit Prizes. And click here to submit to the 2017 Adroit Prizes, open until February 15th!
7: The Adroit Journal visited the New York City Poetry Festival for the fourth year in a row!
Pictured from left to right, readers Elizabeth Onusko & Lucy Wainger, editor-in-chief Peter LaBerge, and readers Brandon Courtney & Eduardo Martinez-Leyva put on a great show.
8: Sixteen out of the fifty Best New Poets 2016 selections were Adroit-affiliated writers.
The collection of staff members and contributors was selected this year by Mary Szybist. Click here to see the full list.
9: We held our third annual Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, a free online program that pairs high school students from around the world with established poetry or prose mentors.
Click here to learn more about the program, and click here to learn about some mentees!
10: Adroit swept the 2016 Teen Sequins contest, sponsored by Gigantic Sequins!
Congratulations to the 2016 class of Teen Sequins: mentorship students Carrie Zhang, Aidan Forster, Ben Read, Margaret Zhang, and Talia Flores, and business development associate Bradley Trumpfheller.
11: Contributors Kaveh Akbar and Javier Zamora received 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, while contributors William Brewer, Charif Shanahan, and (again!) Javier Zamora received 2016-18 Wallace Stegner Fellowships.
The former are sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, while the latter are sponsored by Stanford University.
12: Alex Dimitrov won a Pushcart Prize for his poem “Cocaine,” originally published in the Fall 2015 Issue of The Adroit Journal.
The win marks the first Pushcart Prize receipt and anthology inclusion for a poem published in the journal. Click here to read an interview between Alex and our interview correspondent Audrey Zhao!
11: Adroit filled nearly a third of the seats in the Best Teen Writing 2016 anthology!
The Best Teen Writing of 2016 (ed. Madeleine LeCesne) features selected stories, essays, and poems from the body of writing nationally recognized through the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers.
14: Mentorship students Maya Eashwaran (of Alpharetta, GA) and Joey Reisberg (of Towson, MD) were selected as two of five National Student Poets, representing the south and the northeast respectively.
A ceremony welcoming Joey and Maya hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama was held today at the White House. They join fellow appointed poets Stella Binion (Midwest), Gopal Raman (Southwest), and Maya Salameh (West).
15: Fourteen Adroit students were recognized by the 2016 Foyle Young Poets of the Year Awards, sponsored by the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom.
Each year, an acclaimed pair of judges select fifteen Overall Winners and eighty-five Commended Winners. More than 10,000 entries from over 6,000 poets poured in this year, and judges Malika Booker and W.N. Herbert made the selections. Congratulations to Letitia Chan, whose poem “Making Glutinous Dumplings with My Mother” was selected as an Overall Winner. Letitia, a student at Milton Academy from Hong Kong, studied poetry with Nancy Reddy as part of the 2016 Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.
16: A truly spectacular bunch of eight Adroit-affiliated writers claimed 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature – Creative Writing Fellowships!
Congratulations to contributors Michael Bazzett, Landon Godfrey, Amorak Huey, Matt Morton, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Danez Smith, and Jeanann Verlee, and 2016 Adroit Prize judge Corey Van Landingham, among the other stunning 2017 recipients!
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As 2017 begins, no matter where you find yourself, we hope you’re encountering the new year with equal parts light and strength. It’ll likely be a tough one, but it will be this light that will get us through.
Happy New Year from the staff & editors of The Adroit Journal!
