Contest Winners Booklet, 2014 Sponsored by
Department of English
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This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Young Southern Student Writers (YSSW) contest. The contest, sponsored by the Southern Lit Alliance and the Department of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, grows each year as it continues to highlight the outstanding creativity of the region's best young writers and their teachers. Board and staff members from the Southern Lit Alliance, under the guidance of Executive Director, Susan Robinson, deserve our thanks for their generosity and for their efforts in supporting this year's contest. I am also grateful for this year's readers/judges of the submissions. It is true that every entry is read by a member of UTC's Department of English. These faculty members do so with great generosity and much pleasure. I am grateful for their time, their enthusiasm, and the care with which they read the YSSW submissions. I would especially like to thank our region's dedicated teachers, K-12, who encouraged their students to submit entries. More than that, I am grateful for their efforts as they teach young authors to enjoy the craft and life-long skill of writing. Without our elementary, middle grades, and high school teachers and parents, we would not have such fine work from these young people. Likewise, I thank Yvonne Artis, who provides administrative support for UTC's Composition Program, and Laura Duncan, a graduate student in UTC's MA program in English. They both spent countless hours managing the contest and collecting the winning entries for this online publication. They were dedicated and tireless in their efforts. Finally, I acknowledge the leadership and service of this year's Young Southern Writers Committee, a group of UTC English faculty which includes Marg Jackson (committee chair), April Green, Matt Guy, Rick Jackson, and Krista McKay. Thank you for your collaborative spirit, your enthusiasm, your ideas, and the energy you spent to support these young writers. More than 4,200 students from schools in the Chattanooga area, as well as schools from north Georgia and Alabama, submitted entries this year. This was an especially strong year of quality submissions from our young Southern writers. Keep up the good work, teachers and students alike! Now, read and enjoy! Joe Wilferth, UC Foundation Professor Department of English University of Tennessee at Chattanooga