About the Author

This is an author bio lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Aïda Rogers is a writer, editor, and instructor at the South Carolina Honors College. Her feature stories have won awards from the National Better Newspaper Contest, The Society of Professional Journalists, and the South Carolina Press Association. She is the editor of anthology series State of the Heart: South Carolina Writers on the Places They Love, and co-editor of the anthology series Writing South Carolina: Selections from the High School Writing Contest. Steven Lynn is dean of the South Carolina Honors College and founder of the South Carolina High School Writing Contest. Previously he was chair of the University of South Carolina Department of English. His teaching and publishing interests include eighteenth-century literature (especially Samuel Johnson), rhetoric and composition (especially pedagogy), and science fiction (especially nanotechnology and ethics).

Reviews

People like to say that children are born innocent of any prejudices or hate and that society imprints those messages on them. I guess that has to be true - I don't think racism is a hereditary trait - but as early as first grade, a girl on the playground told me that I was not allowed to play the game she was organizing because my skin was different. I could hear the italics in her voice when she said it, her lips pursed like the letters tasted bad. - Maya Green, "Let Us" A woman in front of us died as well. Her death was the most horrific to witness. No one was there to comfort her. How painful it must be to die alone, I thought. Perhaps she was like my grandmother, always advocating for us to start taking better care of this planet. Yet this was her fate, dying as the world burned. - Rebeccah Ogbuefi, "Beautiful, Fanciful Lies" I am afraid. Terrified. A future is ahead of us, the whole world, that is uncertain. I write this today as Hurricane Michael slams South Carolina, and I have my fifth hurricane day this school year. Five out of the thirty-eight school days this year have been canceled due to a hurricane. And somehow there are people who say that global warming does not exist and is not an imminent threat. This is the future of my kids and grandkids that the generations of my parents and grandparents seem to be ignoring. - Samuel Rosenberg, "A Lofty Achievement" The question is daunting. How can we make South Carolina better? The follow-up question might well be, where do we start? Close to two hundred juniors and seniors in the Palmetto State took on this topic for the sixth annual South Carolina High School Writing Contest. Here are the observations and solutions from twenty-seven of them. Through their poetry, prose, and fiction, these finalists and winners have provided an unblinking look at what they see and experience. Readers of any age can learn from these young writers, and marvel at their work.