Junior Julia Liu recently was selected for an award in the YoungArts competition, based on her submission of a collection of poems in the writing category. 

This year, according to the YoungArts website, more than 800 winners in grades 10 through 12 were selected from nearly 11,000 applications in 10 artistic disciplines — classical music, dance, design, film, jazz, photography, theater, visual arts, voice, and writing. Each award winner receives $250 in this national competition founded in 1981.  

“The inspiration behind many of my poems draws from an amalgamation of the experiences, relationships, and places of my life that ultimately help shape who I am today,” Julia said. “The poems I submitted in particular explore an intersection between cultural identity, growing pains, girlhood, and loss. When crafting these poems, I also wanted to both dissect and highlight the human experience and its tensions, its vulnerability — elements that one might not be able to express outwardly in everyday life.” 

Winners are judged by “discipline-specific panels of artists” in “multiple rounds of review,” noted the website, which also says that winners exhibit “a depth of thinking/performance that exceeds the level of peers at this career stage.”  

And what a writing career Julia has had already. The Connecticut Writing Project — hosted by UConn, in partnership with the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers — honored Julia in her sophomore year with four Gold Key awards in the Scholastic Art & Writing Regional Awards: two for poetry, one for personal essay and memoir, and one for flash fiction.  

Julia said she is “excited to continue writing and to keep exploring the infinite avenues within creative writing.” 

Here is one of the poems she submitted: 

“Daybreak” 

Consider this: before the hunted 

we were prey. Even now you wouldn’t 

believe it—ground tainted slick with dust, rusty 

breeze coaxing all the shutters open. Humidity swells 

in our throats like a prayer & what’s new? 

Summer & all I want is forgiveness. Before 

the destruction I pressed every clover in our 

garden onto wax paper, wiped blood off 

my mosquito bite, juiced kale leaves 

into something like trying. Forgot the destination 

& beginning all at once & now what? Nowadays we 

count things in fractions: Roads breaking miles into ¾ 

bodies. War the only whole—how tenderness licks 

rot into flesh. & what’s left: headwaters thinning 

out like an exit, razing brick tiles into submission. 

Everything I loved an absence. In the next state over, 

over, over: immolation against everything, immolation 

hereditary. If nothing else, then, please—know flight as fight. 

We undress our wilt & the ashes are still 

bleeding against it all. So much of this life given & giving.