By: Edir Coronado
Lucille Miao, a Green Brook resident who graduated high school this June, is a recent Gold Key Award winner for both her short story and critical essay through the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. The awards are given to those students who display a superior talent in the realm of art and literature. The awards are presented by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers and through these awards recipients have the opportunity to gain notoriety, have their works published, and earn scholarships. Students from 7th to 12th grades, private, homeschooled, or public can submit works.
The texts submitted by Miao express societal norms in literature and individual stressors that occur during frantic moments. In her short story, a young woman is in an asylum where she has apparently gone mad, her sister visits her, due to obligation. She openly displays a great deal of disdain for her sister who is not, what she considers, normal. The sister appears to be the exact opposite of the institutionalized sister, perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect vision, while her younger sister has flawed hair, pimples, and glasses.
“The two sisters are supposed to be the id and the superego personified,” explains Miao. The younger sister is acting irrationally while the older sister is extremely moralistic and it seems the ego cannot control both and come to grips with reality. In the end the two sisters have a conflict with each other, but in reality the young woman has a nervous breakdown, which ends in suicide. “I wrote a paper about Toni Morrison’s Beloved using a Freudian lens. So, that, and how stressed my then junior classmates were, influenced my story a lot,” expressed Miao.
jection of dystopian romance. “I wrote both pieces almost a year ago, during The Hunger Games and the Divergent movie craze,” said Miao “I researched dystopian romance books and their significance, but I couldn’t find many articles or scholarly essays about them.” From this Miao decided that she would set out to prove that dystopian romances were significant in the world of film and literature.
In her article she dispels the notion that these works are created, exceptionally for profit and points out that if this was the case the genre of dystopian romance would have been introduced much earlier instead of recent times, in order to exploit the market. She also points out the amount of work that it takes to write novels like The Hunger Games is immense and a certain level of passion is needed to complete a novel.
Miao also received honorable mention for her drawing in pastels of a man looking at the mountains. “For this particular drawing, I started with a photograph of a man’s back against a black background. I found the photograph very striking, and then I imagined a backstory for this person”, voiced Miao. The photo depicts a snapshot of the man’s life.
Lucy Miao will continue her journey by studying art history and looks forward to joining different art organizations at the University of Pennsylvania, expanding her artistic knowledge.
(above) Mountain Call, received honorable mention by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
