Winners of the 2010 Bishop Prizes
After reviewing nearly 500 submissions from all over the world, the editors of The Blue Pencil Online are proud to announce the winners of the 2010 Elizabeth Bishop Prizes!
The Bishop Prizes are held annually in recognition of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Elizabeth Bishop, who was a member of the Walnut Hill Class of 1930 and an the editor of The Blue Pencil. The Prizes are awarded to authors whose work has been published or accepted for publication by The Blue Pencil Online in the preceding year. Each Bishop Prize winner is awarded a $15,000 scholarship to the Writing & Publishing Program at Walnut Hill (contingent upon application to and acceptance by Walnut Hill’s Admission Committee) and receives a copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s Poems, Prose, and Letters, published by The Library of America, a steadfast supporter of the Prizes. Both winners and runners-up are invited to read their work at our annual spring celebration of the print edition of The Blue Pencil. The Prize-winning works will be published on The Blue Pencil Online as soon as they are ready to go to press. (To learn more about the Bishop Prizes, click here, or to see a list of all past Bishop Prize winners, go here.)
And The Winners Are …
Haeyeon Cho has won in the Verse category for her poem, “The Citizenship Test.” Born in Seoul, Korea, Haeyeon moved to the city of Gangneung at age four and has lived there since with her two siblings, her parents, and her paternal grandparents. She is currently a sophomore at Milton Academy, in Milton, Massachusetts. Her favorite books are: Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Atonement, by Ian McEwan, The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, and Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. She is a big fan of peppermint stick ice cream, Mika, and the band “of Montreal.”
“The Citizenship Test” was inspired by Haeyeon’s involvement in a 2009 community service project during which she helped an Albanian man to improve his English. “For each of us English was a second language,”she recalls. “There were some funny moments of miscommunication.” Her poem is informed by observations from her own adjustment to living in the United States. 
♦
Brett Kessler has won in the Fiction category for his short story “For Ariel, On Her Birthday.” Brett is a junior at Flower Mound High School, in Flower Mound, Texas. His favorite writers are Harold Brodkey, Philip Roth, and William Styron. He enjoys European cinema, herbal tea, and the music of Bob Dylan, especially “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
.
.
.
The editors did not award a Prize in playwriting.
◊
Runners-Up
The editors would like to applaud and congratulate the following runners-up, whose work will also appear this spring on The Blue Pencil Online.
Gadi Cohen is a junior at Great Neck North High School, in Great Neck, New York. After moving to the United States from Israel when he was ten years old, Gadi became enchanted by the English language. He is frequently inspired by the natural world and draws on his own life struggles for many of his poems. The editors selected his poem “woman’s mouth” as the runner-up for the 2010 Bishop Prize in Verse. Read it here!
♦
Sarah Gleason is a junior at Friends Select School, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her short story “Missing Eyebrows,” which developed from an exploration of stream-of-consciousness writing after she read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, was selected as the runner-up for the 2010 Bishop Prize in Fiction. Sarah’s favorite book is Gone With the Wind.
.
.