Walker’s Students Honored with Scholastic Writing Awards

The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards have recognized two Walker’s students for their exceptional writing achievements. Abby Spencer ’27 earned a Silver Key for her poem Self-Portrait as a Flamingo, and Kate Xu ’27 received a Gold Key for her Personal Essay and Memoir Father’s Yangmei. Kate was also recognized with Honorable Mention awards for her short story The Receipt and her critical essay The Fragile Man and the Bleeding Woman: Conspicuous Victim and Invisible Wound in Conversations with Friends.

We are proud to celebrate such talented writers in our community.

Established in 1923, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards has championed imaginative and ambitious young artists and writers nationwide for over a century.

Excerpts

Please read below for portions of some of the recognized students’ works.

Abby Spencer ’27

Self-Portrait as a Flamingo
Silver Key, Poetry

I’ve always been reaching, 
a stalk of coral among cattails, 
a pink flare too tall to bend. 

In every class photo
I was the horizon’s hinge, 
the one the sky leaned on.

Balance came by accident—
one leg tucked,
the other remembering the weight of the earth.

Kate Xu ’27

Father’s Yangmei
Gold Key, Personal Essay and Memoir

Every mid-summer, when the air burned and the city sweated, the waxberries (Yangmei) would arrive. Yangmei was dark as a bruised dusk, each one a small universe perched on a cushion of tiny strands, like threads of crystal dipped in purple ink. Every time I pronounced the name, Yangmei 杨梅, a nostalgia rose to the tip of my tongue; the character “杨” echoed the popular trees of the south, a root in local soil. I used to think they glowed. I would hold one up to the afternoon sun, and light would pierce its skin, creating a purple-red halo that stained my finger—a chill like a slight stream, seeping into my nail. With the sudden formation of saliva, I knew I could wait no longer for a bite of that sweetness, just taken from the fridge.

A good one—my dad would say—was as big as a ping-pong ball, swollen with sunlight, its skin shimmering and almost translucent if you held it to the light. As if it were breathing. As if the fruit remembered the leaves, the tree, the mountain it came from.