Unlock Your Writing Potential: Students in Our Writing Competition Preparation Class Are More Likely to Secure Awards
1. What is the Bennington College Young Writers Awards?
Every year, Bennington College hosts the Young Writers Awards—a poetry, fiction, and nonfiction writing competition for high school students around the world.
Over 6,800 students enter in this prestigious writing competition to gain invaluable feedback from the faculty of a college known to produce famous literary figures. Bennington alumni have won 12 Pulitzer Prizes; 3 have been U.S. poet laureates; 4 have won MacArthur Geniuses; countless have become New York Times bestsellers; and two have become one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. Winning entries from the Young Writers Award will be published online on the Bennington College Website, and participants can win up to $1,000 in cash prizes and up to $40,000 in scholarships to attend Bennington College.
2. How does the contest work?
The Bennington College Young Writers Awards has three categories for high school students to select from. Students can only choose one category to submit work, and a student can only enter once per year.
Poetry
Submissions for the poetry category must contain three poems. Any poetry style is accepted, and there is no word or line limit for the poems. See very different examples of how creative you can get with poetry from last year’s first- and third-place winners.
Fiction
Submissions for the fiction category include short stories or one-act plays. The word limit is 1,500 words. If submitting a one-act play, scripts must run for under 30 minutes. See an example of last year’s winning one-act play.
Nonfiction
Submissions for the nonfiction category include personal or academic essays. The word limit is 1,500 words. See an example from last year’s finalist.
Contest Rules
Both the fiction and nonfiction categories have a strict 1,500-word limit. Headers, footers, footnotes, titles, and bibliographies count in the word limit. There are no exceptions to the word limit; the judges require you to cut all excess words.
Submissions must be typed, double-spaced, and in a legible typeface and font size such as Times New Roman 12-point. Each page must include the author’s name.
The Bennington College Young Writers Award has free entry for all students.
Each participant must have a high school teacher serve as a “sponsor” to be the point of contact for the competition. You should choose a teacher who has read and edited your work before, and knows you well. If you’ve submitted your work to other writing competitions and want to try for the Young Writer’s Award with the same piece, that’s acceptable, too. Ensure you get the same teacher who helped you edit the piece to be your sponsoring teacher.
All submissions must be written in English.
3. When is the Bennington Young Writers Awards competition?
The 2024-2025 Bennington College Young Writers Award competition will start officially on September 1 and run through November 1. These submission deadlines remain the same each year. Results are released every spring, typically in April.
4. Who is eligible to enter?
All high school students between 9th and 12th grade from any country are welcome to participate in Bennington Young Writers Award. Gap year students are not accepted.
90% of Aralia Students Win Awards in Writing Contests
Aralia’s writing contest preparation classes have a proven track record of success. Our students consistently win awards, thanks to personalized coaching from award-winning teachers who have years of experience guiding students.
5. How do I enter in the competition?
Print out this Submission Form and mail it along with your work to Bennington College, One College Drive, Bennington, VT 05201 by November 1, 2024.
Contact ywa@bennington.edu for any questions.
6. Why participate in the Bennington Young Writers Awards?
- 1st place winner: $1,000 cash prize
- 2nd place winner: $500 cash prize
- 3rd place winner: $250 cash prize
7. How do I prepare for the Bennington College Young Writers Award?
Read work by past winners
Previous winners of the Bennington Young Writers Award include students from top-ranking high schools such as Philips Academy Andover, Deerfield Academy, Lawrenceville School, and Stanford Online High School. Read the work by the winners from 2023 to get an idea of what it takes to win. Also take a look at winners from 2022 and winners from 2021.
Read the Bennington Review, a national literary journal that publishes exceptional poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and film work. These include written work from published, award-winning authors and professors of prestigious institutions (such as Yale University) worldwide.
Take notes from online resources for how to stand out in a writing competition as a high school student.
Practicing writing poetry
Do simple poetry exercises to brush up on foundations, develop new skills, and find inspiration. Analyze poetic techniques of popular songs. Pay attention to structure, metaphors, and use of other writing tactics that make the words flow smoothly. Try blackout poetry where you take a page of a book/magazine/article along with a black marker and cross out or highlight certain phrases to create a poem. Write a poem for two different speakers/with two perspectives instead of just one. Take a line from the middle of another poem and restart the poem from scratch. Cut one of your previous poems in half and rewrite/rearrange it to deliver the same message and emotions.
Look for inspiration in helpful resources online. Watch spoken word or slam poetry show/videos on YouTube. Check out Poetry Foundation online database of famous poems and prose and their Poem of the Day. Poets.org has almost 16,000 poems for you to browse. Subscribe to their Poem-A-Day email newsletter to get fresh inspiration every day.
Participate in a live in-person or online poetry slam or open mic. Start a poetry club at your high school or organize a one-time event (these will also be excellent leadership experiences to include in your college application). You can also find local events with older speakers who might even have published work. At a poetry event, you can not only meet talented poets who can help edit your work, but also realize how your poems could be improved after reading them aloud in front of an audience. Hearing other students’ work is a great way to gain inspiration and see how your skills compare to your peers.
Regularly keep a journal and scrapbook to illustrate your emotions and special moments in your life. Poetry is the most artistic way of verbal expression, and most of the best of poems are emotionally charged. Keep track of your different feelings, and you never know when a niche memory can become a poem.
Practice writing fiction/nonfiction
The basic formula for an interesting creative writing piece is a catchy opening, engaging plot, and character development—but your story must have more than the basic formula to stand out in a writing competition. Make sure to avoid other common mistakes high school students make in creative writing.
Expand your repertoire of literary tropes. Try using double-layer metaphors. We’re used to seeing single-layer metaphors in most literary pieces, but what if you deepen your metaphor by alluding to something that must allude to the actual point? Write with an unreliable narrator, in which the reader can tell the narrator is purposefully hiding something from them, but they cannot tell the truth. Make your reader curious and think hard about what it is that you’re suggesting. There’re countless ways to improve your writing as a high school student.
Summer is the perfect time for ambitious high school students to brush up on extracurriculars. One of the best ways to improve your writing is simply to write. This summer vacation, always keeps a writing tool near you to jot down ideas and note observations of the world/how other people are at any time. These tidbits can serve as inspiration for your piece. Writing is a long, arduous process with obstacles such as writer’s block, and a winning piece isn’t created until you’ve reworked it innumerable times. It’s better to write an uninteresting paragraph than to write nothing.
6. Why participate in the Bennington Young Writers Awards?
Prepare for the Bennington Young Writers Award with an award-winning teacher with over 30 years of teaching experience from a top-ranking private high school. Take Aralia Education’s Intro to Creative Writing class. In ten 90-minute live-teaching online sessions, Aralia students develop outstanding writing skills in poetry, fiction, and personal narrative. Our students are equipped with the skills and confidence to excel in any creative writing contest. Aralia’s team of expert instructors provide personalized feedback and guidance, helping students to refine their unique voice and storytelling abilities. Learn more about the spring or summer sessions of Aralia’s writing competition preparation class.
