Have you ever watched a full sunset, from light to dark, peacefully? 

In 2005, then-Palo Alto High School senior Anna Rose Luskin was famously assigned to “watch — really watch — the sun set” as part of her internship at the Palo Alto Weekly. 

“So I went Friday after school,” she wrote in her late-January column. “I drove up the mountain and parked around 4:30 p.m., a little early because the sun was still too bright to look at. I waited. Around 5-ish the colors started to change. It was beautiful.”

Anna, who got her start in journalism as a reporter for The Paly Voice, found that she could not feel at ease and fully enjoy the moment, instead constantly thinking about societal pressures. 

“I thought that going up to Skyline would be easy,” she wrote. “I thought I could relax and enjoy it. But in thinking about things like sunsets, and time, and taking time, I rediscovered something about myself: I turn everything into a more stressful situation than it should be.” 

Anna’s perception of this experience resonated with many, touching the hearts of the Palo Alto community. Her influence, in addition to devastating her family, was partly why her sudden death in a car accident in 2007 outside San Luis Obispo, where she was studying journalism at Cal Poly, distressed the community. The details of the tragedy, which led to one of Paly’s most significant scholarships, were painful. 

Anna’s brother, Danny Luskin, was also in the car and survived with major injuries. For Anna, injuries from the crash led to her being placed on life support, where her legacy was honored through a bedside wedding recorded by Palo Alto Weekly editor Jay Thorwaldson. This symbolic ceremony included her then-boyfriend, family, friends and a minister in attendance of Anna’s final moments.

For the rest of the community, a larger public memorial service was held for Anna at Paly’s Senior Courtyard on July 8, 2007, where hundreds gathered to bid their farewells. Since then, a scholarship in her name has been established to honor her memory and inspire future generations. 

The Anna Rose Luskin Memorial Award will be given out for the last time on Thursday — almost 20 years to the day after her graduation — during Paly’s Senior Awards Night at the school’s Performing Arts Center. The scholarship — $4,000 this year —  will be awarded to a senior (or seniors) committed to higher education in California — junior college, CSU or UC — and planning to continue pursuing journalism work in college. The award has been given annually since Anna’s death.

According to Anna’s father, Frederic Luskin — the director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project and a renowned professor in the field of forgiveness — the award was originally established by Anna’s grandfather, Richard Krinsley, to commemorate Anna’s virtue.

“He [Krinsley] gave the Palo Alto school district a certain amount of money to give out each year to a worthy student who was a journalism student,” Prof. Luskin said. “That [the award] came because my father-in-law, who had money and influence, really appreciated the fact that his granddaughter chose to go to San Luis Obispo. … He really liked the fact that she was humble. And so he wanted to honor her humility and decency.”

Prof. Luskin said that the specific state school requirements of the award are designed to recognize excellence in public education, embodying what Anna stood for. 

“I personally, 100 percent, am behind trying to help kids in good state schools, not expensive or private schools,” he said. “I believe in public education. I just do. For us, our daughter struggled at Paly. She didn’t find an easy place for herself. … If she got a B, she didn’t want to shoot herself. She didn’t need to go to the top Ivy League. She saw herself as a kid, a nice kid. … She decided on Cal Poly because those were the kind of kids she wanted to spend time with.” 

Amy Yu, recipient of the award in 2021 and current senior at the University of California, Davis, said she felt both connected to and recognized by Anna’s journalism work. 

“I think growing up in Palo Alto, you hear a lot about top-20 schools and Ivys and things like that,” Yu said. “In the packet for the award that I got, it was a bunch of columns from Anna Luskin, and she had the exact same experience. …. I remember being like, ‘wow, she really gets me.’ … It was crazy just to see that this is a very Palo Alto or even Bay Area experience. … Anna Luskin was able to chronicle the experiences of so many people, so many kids in Palo Alto, where they don’t feel like they’re enough and they feel all this pressure to go to a top 20 and do everything and have no time for sleep and all of that. … That feeling was kind of just, very surreal to kind of see that it happened 20 years ago and it was happening again.” 

Sharing Yu’s view, 2019 award recipient Asia Gardias said that Anna’s journalism encapsulated the significance of finding meaning in life.

“When I received the award, I was reading a lot about Anna’s life, and thinking about how beautifully her family memorialized her,” Gardias said. “The community just memorialized her life, her story and her contribution to storytelling and joy — particularly the journalism that was done around kind of who she was and how she was able to really identify the important things in the moment in life, which is something I think is very important generally, but particularly for the community in Palo Alto and young people in Palo Alto, to hear. … It [Anna’s work] was definitely very moving for me, but also kind of grounded me in the kind of legacy of what journalism does for students.” 

Nanor Balabanian, the first recipient of the award, founder and director of the Hidden Road Initiative and adjunct lecturer at the American University of Armenia, said that receiving the award gave her a positive self-view during times of high stress. 

“I just remember always feeling really stupid at Paly,” Balabanian said. “The social pressures were a lot then [in 2008], everybody was trying to get into the best university … and I remember just struggling to get an A because it was so competitive, everything was so hard. So getting that award, to me, felt like a very big accomplishment and a very big recognition in believing in myself.”

According to Balabanian, the scholarship also provided critical finances for her higher education.  

“I got accepted to UC Santa Barbara, and we really didn’t have money,” Balabanian said. “My parents were like, ‘We will not be able to send you to college.’ … My parents said we only have $4,000 a year, and if you can find the rest you can go [to college]. … I remember applying to every scholarship I found, maybe 15 scholarships every single year, working three jobs, working the summer before, hustling and [still] did not pay for my tuition. … That award made a significant impact because I really could not afford it [college] at the time. So every little sum was of significant importance to me.”

After graduating from UC Santa Barbara, Balabanian said she received her Master of Education from Stanford University, where Prof. Luskin, by chance, helped guide her through challenging times.

“I didn’t know her [Anna], but I knew Professor Luskin,” Balabanian said. “He actually was my professor later at Stanford, which is really ironic and interesting, because he helped me a lot with understanding my mental health at the time, amongst other stuff.”

According to Prof. Luskin, Anna aspired to be a journalist for the Palo Alto Weekly after graduating.

“When she left for Cal Poly again 20 years ago, she had a thought of coming back to the Bay Area and working at the Palo Alto Weekly at the time, which was a thick paper that came out twice a week that everyone read,” Prof. Luskin said. “She was good friends with the publisher and editor, and she left for that college with a very strong desire to be a journalist. And what she took at Cal Poly deepened that interest.”

He also said that Anna wanted a comfortable, quiet life in Palo Alto, surrounded by family, rather than solely focusing on success in accomplishments.  

“Her hope was to come back to Palo Alto or somewhere around here, work locally as a journalist or something,” he said. “She had more of a family sense than a personal achievement sense, but that was in her. Her mother was a second-grade teacher at Nixon School, and Anna went to Escondido School, and we lived in Escondido Village. She was surrounded by high-achievement energy. And, you know, that’s not just what pulled her. ”

In a short story titled “My Legacy,” Anna wrote, “I want people to remember me by my relationships with my loved ones, my contributions to society, and my successes.” 

Although the Anna Rose Luskin Memorial Award will no longer be given, Anna’s ideals will live on through her words — from navigating academic pressure to appreciating the sunset, supporters hope her contributions will always hold a place in the hearts of readers. 

“To the people reading this, younger or older,” she wrote in her ‘sun set’ column, “Ask yourself: ‘Am I able to take the time to watch a full sunset?’ If not, maybe you should. It’s worth a shot. For me, maybe next time….”

Since the award’s inception in 2008, Paly journalism advisers have been sharing Anna’s story as an antidote to college pressures in the form of a short booklet with her key public articles and the reporting about her last days.  

Below are the stories from the booklet, including those on the last days of her life and her staff profile while on The Paly Voice: 

• Anna Luskin’s Paly Voice staff profile (as of June 24, 2005) 
• “First Person: Striving to be perfect — but at what cost?” (Palo Alto Weekly, July 14, 2004)
• “First Person: Rethinking my priorities for the future — beyond Palo Alto” (Palo Alto Weekly, Sept. 1, 2004)
• “Guest Opinion: College applications: three students, three completely different experiences” (Palo Alto Weekly, Dec. 22, 2004)
• “First Person: Can you pass the ‘watching the sun set’ test?” (Palo Alto Weekly, Jan. 26, 2005) 
• “Guest Opinion: Yes, he’s my dad. Yes, she’s my daughter.” (Palo Alto Weekly, March 9, 2005) 
• “Anna Luskin’s ‘legacy’ vision of her life” (Palo Alto Weekly, June 28, 2007)
• “Symbolic bedside wedding caps Anna’s life” (Palo Alto Weekly, June 29, 2007)

Editor’s note: While Anna’s scholarship is being discontinued, donations to the Paly journalism program can be made through the Paly MAC Boosters. If you have a specific question or suggestion, please reach out to Paul Kandell, adviser to The Paly Voice.