Three students from La Jolla schools joined others across the country in parlaying regional acclaim for art and writing projects into victories in the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
The national competition last month came on the heels of a regional contest earlier this year, when about 20 La Jolla students received awards.
The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, presented by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, are open to students in grades 7-12 from the United States, U.S. territories and Canada. A total of 110,000 teenagers entered more than 310,000 original works in 28 subcategories in 2025.
Regional winners who were given a gold key were invited to submit for the national competition, for which results were announced March 25.
These La Jolla students were recognized with silver medals:
Abbey Witt, Muirlands Middle School
An already full schedule hasn’t stopped Abbey from writing in her free time.
Her award-winning 120-page novel, “Jane Doe and the Tomb of Bastet,” is a “feminist action adventure” about a female reporter in the 1980s who tries to find an Egyptian treasure but instead stumbles across a conspiracy.
Abbey’s writing style can be described as “cinematic,” she said.
“It really came from all the movies I’ve watched — especially the action and adventure type of movies,” Abbey said, naming movies such as “The Adventures of Tintin” and the Indiana Jones franchise as primary sources of inspiration. “I remember I was watching one when I was a bit younger and for whatever reason I was like ‘I want to do that in a novel.’
“It made me feel a rush like I’ve never experienced before and I wanted to put that in a book because I couldn’t find anything like that in the library back then.”
Abbey worked on “Jane Doe and the Tomb of Bastet” for nearly a year, waking up early to write before classes. Her work continues today, as she hopes to publish the book before she starts college.
Abbey’s father, Christopher, said having a 14-year-old wake up early before school is already an impressive feat. Her morning writing routine is on another level, he said.
“The award is great, but to see her set an alarm clock … to start writing before school, to give herself the time and commitment to this every morning, it’s not just a temporary fad that she’s going through,” Christopher Witt said. “She is so incredibly committed to it.”
In the regional competition, Abbey received a gold, silver and honorable mention across three categories: flash fiction, novel and personal essay and memoir.
Ella Xing, The Bishop’s School
Over the past couple of years, Ella often has focused her attention on emergency drills, which she sees as too rigid and easily dismissed by her peers.
A virtual reality game she designed to help students better engage with the drills won a first-place award in the 2025 Greater San Diego Science & Engineering Fair, and now she’s a silver award winner in the Scholastic Art & Writing competition.
Bishop’s School student Ella Xing shows a display about her award-winning emergency simulation project at the 2025 Greater San Diego Science & Engineering Fair. (Peilin Fu)
Her latest award-winning entry is a satirical article speaking to the flaws of fire drills in American schools. She submitted several papers, but this one stuck the most.
“I took a risk by writing in satire, using humor to address these issues in evacuation procedures,” Ella said. “I think this was a rather creative approach to writing, contrasting the typical academic styles we’re used to using in school.”
She said her win came as a surprise.
“This was originally a passion project rooted in VR game design and computer science, and the article was just a fun way to reflect on the results of my work,” Ella said. “The fact that I received a national award in such a broad competition was truly something I never expected.”
Ivy Yang, The Bishop’s School
Judges deemed Ivy’s poem “Pretty Good” as good enough for a silver medal.
“Pretty Good” chronicles Ivy’s experience as “ABC,” or American-born Chinese. She said her goal in writing the poem was to tell an all-encompassing story of her identity and humanize the immigration experience.
“I feel like what we are missing sometimes is our ability to see the other side and have empathy for others,” she said, “and by writing about it, even if one more person understands what the experience of both immigration and being a multicultural person is, I think I accomplished the goal.”
Ivy Yang, the recipient of four gold awards in the regional Scholastic Art & Writing Awards earlier this year, won a silver medal in the national competition in March. (Provided by Ivy Yang)
Ivy won four gold awards in the regionals. Ultimately it was her poem that resonated with the national judges.
She has two theories for why “Pretty Good” made the cut: the amount of subtle detail she packed into it, and her ability to edit herself.
Ivy is the managing editor of The Bishop’s School’s student newspaper, The Tower, where she edits 60-70 articles per year. The ability to recognize what makes good writing enabled her to deliver an effective poem, she said.
“Even though journalism and poetry are very different styles of writing, ultimately I think all forms of writing have the goal of communicating something that matters to yourself, to your community or even to the world,” she said.
See the full list of national winners at medals.artandwriting.org. ♦