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2004

APRIL 2003

Barnard/CBS High School Essay Contest Winners Are Powerful Writers
by Pola Rosen, Ed.D.

For the past twelve years the Barnard College/CBS essay contest for public high school students in New York City has challenged students to write about, “A Woman I Admire,” according to Christine Royer, founder and organizer of the contest. This year over 685 entries from 79 high schools around the city were submitted. Judith Shapiro, President of Barnard College, and a graduate of New York City public schools (PS 26 and Junior High School 16, Queens) said she was “thrilled to support the vision and promise exemplified by this year’s winners. Since 1889 Barnard has been committed to advancing the academic, personal and professional success of women.” Among the accomplished writers training and inspiring future generations of women at Barnard are Mary Gordon, Carol Phillips, Ellen McLaughlin, and Quandra Prettyman. Serious writers, according to Shapiro, have said that they are motivated by a search for truth. Some have said that the role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say; Toni Morrison said “I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have answers to. Most of the essayists chose to honor their mothers or grandmothers. President Shapiro spoke of some of the entries: there is the mother who leaves behind an abusive partner, moving from one home to the next with her young daughter, earning a bachelors degree despite all odds; there is the mother struggling to survive with four young children in Bosnia after her husband is forcibly taken away; and

then there is a deaf mother who inspires her daughter with the unique ability to understand and to love. Shapiro spoke eloquently to the winners: “We meet these women in your essays and they come alive in powerful prose. You took the blank page and made it your own. You organized your thoughts and imbued them with feeling. Whether or not you choose writing as a career, I am confident that throughout your lives you will continue to pursue the search for truth and beauty through the written word.

There were four cash prize winners and 26 certificate winners; essays were selected by a panel of judges including Cindy Stivers, President and Editor in Chief of TimeOut New York, Pola Rosen, Publisher and Editor in Chief of Education Update, Barnard English Professors Quandra Prettyman and Elizabeth Dalton and author Ayana Byrd.

The first prize winner, Aminata Cisse, received $1000 and her school, Midwood High School in Brooklyn, received $500. Her essay appears below.

 

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