MSMS seniors Colin Chung, Jake Heisler, Anthony Nguyen, Ryan Wei and Althea Wells took all five winning spots in the Eudora Welty Ephemera Prize for High School Creative Writing on Oct. 6, while junior Harper Hipp earned an honorable mention.
The Eudora Welty Ephemera Prize was established in 1989 in recognition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer from Jackson. Created and maintained by Mississippi University for Women faculty, the organization has given out over $30,000 in prize money since its inception.
This year’s prompt was “Secrets and Revelations: ‘A Dark Thread Running Through My Story,’” a response to Welty’s novel “Losing Battles.”
“We usually do very well in it,” Creative Writing and University English Literature teacher Thomas Richardson said. “Last year, we had three winners and all the honorable mentions … and then a couple years before, we had all five winners but no honorable mentions.”
Richardson said judging the competition is difficult despite the school’s strong track record.
“It’s always tough to judge [the competition],” Richardson said. “The six students we had recognized … I can see why [they were] picked, but you could also have me list out 15 others I think would have been in the running as well.”
The competition is the first part of the Eudora Welty Symposium, which was held on Oct. 24.
“The Eudora Welty Symposium is one of the greatest events that has graced [MUW’s] campus,” Richardson said. “It brings contemporary southern writers together to read their works, to do Q&As, and to meet with students.”
The winners of the Ephemera competition received an opportunity to meet one-on-one with the writers over lunch, as well as a $200 cash prize.
“I think it’s really important for our students to see that writing is not just a thing you do for school. There are professionals doing this, and [they] are not hidden behind some sort of curtain,” Richardson said.
Heisler’s, Nguyen’s and Wei’s submissions came from their English Literature college essay assignment, where students wrote essays according to a college application prompt.
“Mr. Richardson emailed a few people whose personal essays he thought met the prompt for the Ephemera Prize, encouraging us to workshop it more and submit it for the competition,” Nguyen said.
While workshopping his essay, Nguyen said he had plenty of people read it.
“It just got to the point where I wanted as many eyes on it as possible,” he said. “Every time [someone] reviewed it … there was something new to consider to make it better.”Wei said he revised his essay about eight times, with input from different people each time.
“I definitely [did] not think the paper I submitted to Ephemera would be my final draft,” he said.
Wei said he is excited to meet with the professional writers at the symposium.
“I think it’s a huge honor to be able to go up there and meet those authors. I think it [will] be a really fun time,” Wei said.
