Ms. Love creates new Mays Writing committee

By Wallis Rogin

Photo courtesy of Wallis Rogin

The annual Mays Writing competition held at St. Mary’s has changed. Instead of a small faculty committee choosing the prompt and judging the writing, highschool students are now filling some of these roles. 

Upper School English teacher Ms. Jessica Love is newly in charge of the Mays Writing competition and realized that it would benefit from some student-teacher collaboration. As a result, Ms. Love decided to introduce a new element to the yearly tradition. 

Ms. Love said, “It was an effort to make the annual Mays Writing Contest more meaningful for the students by having more student involvement on the editorial side.”

Once this was announced, several juniors and seniors expressed their interest and were chosen to be on the new Mays Committee. The committee consists of the following students: Amelia Dowling (12), Olivia Feliz (12), Keyona Hooker (11), Hannah Kerlan (11), Cam Lawrence (11), Bella Littleton (12), Sara Ottinger (11), Kate Prillaman (11), Callie Whitmann (11).

Dowling said, “We worked together to create the prompt in the interest of making it more exciting for the students.”

The student committee will judge all of the Lower and Middle School students’ writing, and the faculty will continue to judge the Upper School. Ms. Love wants to keep the anonymity of this competition, so she decided to refrain from having the students judge their peers. 

Ms. Love said, “Judging creative writing works best when judged blind.”

Mays Writing is an SMS tradition that allows all students to showcase their writing talent. With all of the other stress that comes with school, Mays is an activity that can be viewed as recreational, rather than forced. 

Dowling said, “I like how it showcases the creativity of every grade level since everyone receives the same prompt… you can see how a second grader would write differently than a senior.” 

Ms. Love said, “I love that it is a true moment of connection for our community. Every student writes a story inspired by the same prompt, but it yields totally different stories.”