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Founded in 2013 by Steven Lynn, dean of the South Carolina Honors College, this annual writing contest was designed to engage the state's future leaders and thinkers. Each year the Honors College invited South Carolina high school juniors and seniors to respond to the question "How can we make South Carolina better?" in 750 words or fewer, in the genre of their choice. 

The finalists, selected by a panel of preliminary judges, were invited to the University of South Carolina campus for a second round comprising a forty-minute impromptu writing contest. This round was evaluated by two grand judges—South Carolina natives who have achieved national acclaim: short-story writer and novelist Pam Durban and poet Nikky Finney. Each chose a topic for the impromptu contest: write about a meaningful book and complete the statement "I come from… ." This volume features the writing of the seventy-one finalists from the 2016–17 South Carolina High School Writing Contest.

University of South Carolina Press

Young Palmetto Books

Writing South Carolina: Selections from the Fourth Annual High School Writing Contest

Susan Diamond Riley

A fistful of bones and a mysterious treasure hunt—not quite what twelve-year-old Chicagoan Delta Wells is expecting when she arrives on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, to visit her grandparents for the summer! But when Pops tells her that his beloved Island History Museum may be demolished to make room for a golf resort, Delta visits the museum property and discovers a skeleton hidden in the marsh. The bones and a long-secret message from the past send Delta and her younger brother, Jax, on a race to unearth the island's secrets, save their grandfather's museum, and help complete a mission someone started more than 150 years ago.

From the Civil War ruins of Hilton Head, to the site of the H. L. Hunley submarine in Charleston and the University of South Carolina's historic Horseshoe in Columbia, Delta and Jax's vacation is an exciting and educational adventure through history.

The Sea Island's Secret: A Delta & Jax Mystery

Carolina Fund

"How can we make South Carolina better?" Normally this issue is reserved for lawmakers and voters, but Writing South Carolina, volume 3, gives voice to fifty high school juniors and seniors from across the Palmetto State who have offered suggestions. The University of South Carolina Honors College annual writing contest presents a necessary voice for them as well as a revealing portrait of their lives and desires using their own words and insights. Contest judge Mary Alice Monroe provides the foreword for this volume and has said of the contributing students, "They are astonishingly talented, further ahead in the game than I was at their age."

Through a variety of short, creative genres, students share their own gripping experiences in South Carolina, often about of growing up and going to school here. This year's selections range from poems about the cycle of abuse to short stories about minimum wage to essays about problematic sex education in public schools. Writing South Carolina, volume 3, offers a collection steeped in creativity, honesty, and clarity. High school students witness and encounter some of the most subtle and serious problems in South Carolina's school system—and they demand change.

Monroe, a New York Times best-selling author of children's books and novels, including A Lowcountry Christmas and The Butterfly's Daughter, provides a foreword.

Writing South Carolina: Selections from the Third Annual High School Writing Contest

Louise Meriwether

The true story of an enslaved African American man who escaped to freedom and became a military and political leader

Robert Smalls, born a slave in 1839 in Beaufort, South Carolina, gained fame as an African American hero of the American Civil War. The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls tells the inspirational story of Small's life as a slave, his boyhood dream of freedom, and his bold and daring plan as a young man to commandeer a Confederate gunboat from Charleston Harbor and escape with fifteen fellow slaves and family members. Smalls joined the Union Navy and rose to the rank of captain and became the first African American to command a U.S. service ship. After the war Smalls returned to Beaufort, bought the home of his former master, and began a long career in state and national politics.

This new edition of The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls, originally published in 1971, features Louise Meriwether's original narrative, now illustrated by the colorful paintings of renowned Southern artist Jonathan Green.

The Freedom Ship of Robert Smalls

Young South Carolinians offer their perspectives on and visions for the future of the state

"All of you who contributed to this book write much better than I did in high school." That remarkable observation was made by Pat Conroy in the foreword to the first collection of student writing generated by the South Carolina High School Writing Contest, and it embodies the contest's goals: to encourage young people to write, to think deeply and creatively, to express themselves, and thereby to recognize and cultivate their abilities. This second volume of Writing South Carolina features the insightful and inspiring entries of each of the twenty-nine winners and finalists: high school juniors and seniors who were challenged to share, using any genre, their ideas for making South Carolina a better place to live.

Through essays, poems, and stories, students used their imaginations to celebrate South Carolina and to envision a state that might be improved by addressing civic and social ills, such as domestic violence, racism, drugs, poverty, and educational inequality. Despite being raised in the age of texts and tweets, these young writers offer their unique perspectives—often revealing, thought-provoking, troubling, and exhilarating—in language that is uniquely their own and often eloquent and passionate.

Marjory Wentworth, who provides a foreword to this collection, is South Carolina's poet laureate and has served as a judge for the competition with Pat Conroy.

Writing South Carolina: Selections from the Second Annual High School Writing Contest

"How should we improve the state of South Carolina?" That invitingly open-ended question served as the basis for the first annual South Carolina High School Writing Contest as the call went out in fall 2013 to juniors and seniors across the Palmetto State, encouraging them to take a stance through good, thought-provoking writing. The nearly five hundred responses that resulted were as impressive in quality as they were in quantity. Young writers sounded off on issues of race relations, environmental conservation, economic imbalance, opportunities of infrastructure, substance and physical abuse, and the maladies of education. Most wrote on issues of education rooted in their own burgeoning awareness of its gifts and limitations in their lives. From that pool of contestants, twenty-three finalists rose to the top to have their initial entries and subsequent writing on a favorite book or place judged by best-selling author Pat Conroy. The insightful and often revelatory responses from those finalists—including the first, second, and third place winners by grade—are collected here in Writing South Carolina.

In heartfelt essays, poems, short stories, and drama, these diverse writers lay bare their attitudes and impressions of South Carolina as they have experienced it and as they hope to reshape it. The resulting anthology is a compelling portrait of the Palmetto State's potential as advocated by some of its best and brightest young writers. Editor Steven Lynn provides an introduction and contest judge Pat Conroy provides a foreword to the collection.

Senior Winners / Walter B. Edgar Award
• First Place: Rowan Miller, Aiken, Aiken High School, "Different Worlds" (essay)
• Second Place: Katherine Frain, Mount Pleasant, Wando High School, "Place of Refuge" (poem)
• Third Place: Allison Able, Saluda, Saluda High School, "Song of Silence" (essay)
• Honorable Mention: Drake Shadwell, Dalzell, Wilson Hall, Untitled (play)
• Honorable Mention: Jordhane Stanley, Seabrook Island, South Carolina Virtual School, Untitled (essay)

Junior Winners / Dorothy S. Williams Award
• First Place: Hallie Chametzky, Columbia, Dreher High School, "Change in Simple Arithmetic" (poem)
• Second Place: Zoe Abedon, Sullivan's Island, Charleston County School of the Arts, "To Overcome" (poem)
• Third Place: Madison Seabrook, Charleston County School of the Arts, "A Novel Prospect" (poem)
• Honorable Mention: Suzanne Jackson, Charleston, Charleston County School of the Arts, "Local since Forever" (essay)
• Honorable Mention: Rebecca Walker, Spartanburg, Dorman High School, Untitled (essay)

Writing South Carolina: Selections from the First High School Writing Contest

Courtney McKinney-Whitaker

Set during the Anglo-Cherokee War (1758–1761), The Last Sister traces a young woman's journey through grief, vengeance, guilt, and love in the unpredictable world of the early American frontier. After a band of fellow settlers fakes a Cherokee raid to conceal the murder of her family, seventeen-year-old Catriona "Catie" Blair embarks on a quest to report the crime and bring the murderers to justice, while desperately seeking to regain her own sense of safety. 

This journey leads Catie across rural South Carolina and through Cherokee territory—where she encounters wild animals, physical injury, privation, British and Cherokee leaders, and an unexpected romance with a young lieutenant from a Scottish Highland regiment—on her path to a new life as she strives to overcome personal tragedy. 

The Anglo-Cherokee War erupted out of tensions between British American settlers and the Cherokee peoples, who had been allies during the early years of the French and Indian War. In 1759 South Carolina governor William Henry Lyttelton declared war on the Cherokee nation partly in retaliation for what he perceived as unprovoked attacks on backcountry settlements. 

Catie's story challenges many common notions about early America. It also presents the Cherokee as a sovereign and powerful nation whose alliance was important to Britain and addresses the complex issues of race, class, and ethnicity that united and divided the British, the Cherokee, the Scottish highlanders, and the Scottish lowlanders, while it incorporates issues of power that led to increased violence toward women on the early American frontier.

The Last Sister: A Novel

Fragments of the Ark follows the exploits of runaway slave Peter Mango, his family, and a band of fellow escaped slaves as they commandeer a Confederate gunboat out of Charleston harbor and deliver it to the Union navy. Mango is made captain of this liberated vessel and commands its crew through the duration of the war. He also travels to Washington to meet President Lincoln, adding his voice to others trying to persuade the president to allow black men to enlist in the armed forces. After the war Mango bought a home from his former master and became a political organizer for voting rights. Eventually he was elected a delegate to South Carolina's state convention to rewrite its constitution. 

Based on the inspirational life of Robert Smalls, Fragments of the Ark explores the American Civil War through the eyes of its most deeply wounded souls. Against this chaotic backdrop, the novel sweeps readers into Mango's heroic quest for the most basic of human rights—a safe haven to nurture a family bound by love and not fear, and the freedom to be the master of his own life.

Young Palmetto Books - The book series

Young Palmetto Books - The book series

Young Palmetto Books books in order

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