Literary Journal for Young Writers
Siya Gupta is a junior at Herricks High School on Long Island. Her photography has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. In her free time, Siya enjoys doing paint by numbers, making coffee, and roller skating around her neighborhood.
Paige Glowacki is a photographer born and raised in Dallas, Texas. Her work features her experience of emotions that are difficult to express in words. Through portraits, especially self-portraits, and still life, Glowacki explores the feeling of being overwhelmed. She captures the simultaneous beauty and destruction in the world around her. Glowacki creates images that are both visually striking and emotionally powerful. Her work exists as a way for her to communicate complicated ideas without utilizing words.
This project explores feelings of nostalgia of her childhood with her Ukrainian grandmother. The stark contrast between light and dark emphasizes the eerie and unsettling nature of innocence. Her work explores the surreal and evokes a sense of unease and discomfort, creating visual metaphors for emotions and ideas.
Contemporary art often challenges perceptions of reality and explores the theme of societal decay. With an eeriness that arises from something familiar and simultaneously unsettling, she creates a sense of loss, nostalgia, of strangeness, an artful fluctuation between presence and absence. She is reminding others that there is still beauty to be found in decay and ruin.
Clementine Zei is a high school senior from the Greater Boston Area. Her writing has been published in Cathartic Youth Literary Magazine, Down in the Dirt Magazine, and Curieux Academic Journal. She has also been recognized for her essays with Silver Keys in the Scholastic Arts in Writing Awards as well as the annual Boston Mayor’s Poetry Program. Clementine is inspired by surrealism, fantasy, and dreams, often incorporating personification, folktale, and the expansiveness of nature in her writing. Outside of literature, Clementine is passionate about film and is always excited to watch a new series or movie.
Recess: As the two boys scale the towering letters of “Pismo Beach”, their determined expressions and outstretched arms speak to a sense of adventure and exploration. The bold, vibrant colors of the letters stand in stark contrast to the muted, lowkey tones of the surrounding landscape, emphasizing the excitement and joy that comes with discovery. Yet there’s a sense of nostalgia too, as if the boys are reaching back into the past and pulling something timeless and treasured into the present. Perhaps this artwork speaks to the idea that, no matter how far we go or how much we change, there will always be a place for us in the familiar landscapes of our memories.
Arihant Jain is an artist and writer from the San Francisco Bay Area who melds his passions in engineering and writing to create poetry. He is Teen Sequins Top 5 Featured Poet and his work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and National YoungArts Foundation. When not creating, he enjoys solving algorithmic problems.
Isabella Jia Dunsby is a high school student in Seoul, South Korea. Her work has previously been published in The Daphne Review and Cathartic Literary Magazine among others.