Four Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science students are among the five winners of the Eudora Welty Ephemera Prize for High School Creative Writing.

Laurel Lancaster, Carly Sneed, Makayla Raby and Summar McGee earned the honors for their various submissions.

The contest is conducted by Mississippi University for Women and is named in honor of the Pulitzer Prize winner who attended the then Mississippi State College for Women. The award is also named after one of MUW’s early creative writing journals, “The Ephemera.”

Each year the $200 prize is awarded to up to five entries. The contest allows for one entry that must fall under the following categories: fiction, essay or poetry.

“I did not expect to win the prize at all,” said Lancaster. “I thought the poem I wrote was rather risky, and I initially feared that I had made the wrong choice in submitting it.” Her “wrong choice” that won the award was titled “Amazing Grace.”

“It was about two women whom I observed walking into church holding hands,” Lancaster said. “This was right after the Supreme Court ruling regarding same-sex marriage. As a Catholic and LGBT+ ally, I felt like it was a story that needed to be told.”

The judges of this year’s competition were T.J. Jarrett, author of Zion, and Michael Kardos, author of Before He Finds Her. 

“I will definitely enter the competition again, if I can,” Lancaster said. “I had a lot of fun in the competition both years.”