DHS Junior places in prestigious competition

The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards have been providing teens with incredible opportunities for 88 years. Artists like Robert Redford, Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and Sylvia Plath all received awards when they were in high school, and now a new name joins their rank: Clara Fannjiang.

Fannjiang, a junior at DHS, began submitting her work to the competition when she was in seventh grade, but failed to place until her sophomore year of high school when she received two gold medals for an individual poem and a collection of poems.

This year, Fannjiang received a silver medal for another collection of poems. “Most of them were kind of surrealist, but all of them kind of stemmed from something in, like, daily life,” Fannjiang said of her collection.

While Fannjiang plans to major in math and sciences, the program offers scholarship opportunities for graduating high school seniors. “It’s just a constant encouragement to keep writing.”