Junior Ali Dwight’s poem, “Dreams of an Insomniac,” took third place in the upperclass division.  Dwight entered her first writing contest in fourth grade and won first place.  “I’m really into writing and poetry,” she said.

– Elizabeth SawkaPalo Alto High School’s student literary magazine, Calliope, will highlight the winning poetry and short story contest entries in its issue coming out later this month.
Calliope co-editor-in-chief junior Kevin Lee said there were 25 underclass and 13 upperclass entries between the two contests.
According to Calliope co-editor-in-chief Rina Hung, the winners are as follows: (One upperclassman and one underclassman per category, respectively) 
Short story contest 
First place: Emily Dorward, Elani Gitterman
Second place: Isabel Kwiatkowski, Kelly Stern
Third place: Gadi Cohen, Jessica Tam
Poetry contest
First place: Gadi Cohen, Caroline Vericat
Second place: Zach Freier-Harrison, Janine Kim
Third place: Ali Dwight, Annie Chen
Private funds from the Sullivan Short Story Award and the Sanford Webster Junior Memorial Poetry Award fund the cash prizes, English teacher and Calliope adviser Kevin Sharp said.
According to Calliope’s co-editors-in-chief — juniors Rina Hung, Kevin Lee and Jen Lin — the amount of the cash prizes has yet to be determined. The funds for the awards are running low but should be supplemented somewhat by the funds raised from a bake sale Calliope held earlier this year.
According to Sharp, a local writers group unconnected to Paly judged the entries and selected the winners.
“Everyone’s submissions were fantastic,” Hung said.  
Twenty-six different people submitted writing, and many submitted multiple pieces, Lee said.
Gadi Cohen said the inspiration for his first-prize poem came from an essay he wrote.
“In AP English we had to write an essay, and I wrote something I never thought I could write, with really good insight, and it [the first line of the essay] ended up being the first line of the poem,” he said.
Cohen, an Israeli citizen, also won third place in the upperclass division short story contest for an “artsy-fartsy” fiction piece imagining an imprisoned Israeli soldier’s life.  He wrote it shortly after Hamas released a video several years ago of one of their prison guards mocking and beating an Israeli prisoner.  He revisited and revised his story before entering it into the short story contest. 
Though the Calliope editors play no role in the judging process, when asked about  their favorite submission, the answer was unanimous:
“We all thought that Ali Dwight’s poem particularly stood out,” Lee said.
Dwight’s poem, “Dreams of an Insomniac,” won third place in the upperclass division.
“I wrote it for my class, American Classics,” Dwight said. “The prompt was, ‘What is America?’ I got to thinking about mindless consuming. Also, I stay up really late, and that’s when infomercials are on, so that was my inspiration.”
Dwight entered her first writing contest, a national competition, in fourth grade and won first place.  This is the first time she has entered the Calliope poetry contest.
“I do a lot of writing on my own time, so I thought I might as well do something with it,” she said.