Tuesday, June 17, 2025
Three juniors at Oyster Bay High School have been recognized by the National Council of Teachers of English for their outstanding submissions to the 2025 Achievement Awards in Writing contest.
Giovanna Lisa, Mosie Bradley, and Riley Baehr earned the Superior, Excellent and Merit ratings, respectively. The three ranks are the second, third and fourth highest ratings that students can achieve in the competition.
The NCTE Achievement Awards in Writing program was established in 1957 to encourage high school students to refine and celebrate their literary talents. This year, 680 students from 41 U.S. states, Washington D.C., and international schools in countries as diverse as China, Jordan, South Africa, and Switzerland submitted entries.
The three juniors were nominated by their teacher Deirdre Faughey, who teaches them in AP Language and Composition, AP Research and College English. She also serves as the adviser to the school’s chapter of Quill & Scroll, the international honor society for high school journalists.
“The NCTE is a national organization for English teachers, and I’ve been a member since I started teaching,” Faughey said. “They have a different prompt each year, and this year, they wanted students to write about how literature can be healing. When I saw all of the writing come in, I was just really impressed with the writing of these students.”
All three honorees wrote their essays earlier this year as part of their application to the newly formed National English Honor Society chapter at Oyster Bay High School. Their essays were judged by independent educators selected by the NCTE, who evaluated each piece holistically on content, tone, organization, and style.
For Lisa, 17, writing has always been a personal outlet.
“Whenever I have a lot of thoughts that I want to share or express, I’ll always write it down, flesh them out,” she said. “So, I’ve always had a strong relationship with writing in that way.”
Lisa’s essay reflected on how two novels, “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens and “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr, shaped her outlook.
“I was thinking about the plot of those books,” she said, “really reflecting on my experience reading them, and how that kind of impacted me in a sense, and how that contributed to the person that I am today.”
Bradley also explored his evolving relationship with literature.
“I interpreted the prompt more as how I have grown and learned from each book that I’ve read and how my relationship to books has changed throughout my life,” he said. “I started by talking about the “Percy Jackson” series, and then I talked about other books that have shaped the way that I view the world around me, like “The Hunger Games” and “1984” by George Orwell.”
Baehr, 17, took a different route, reflecting on her emotional connection with characters, particularly from the graphic novel “Nimona” by ND Stevenson.
“I immediately started thinking of characters that I really related to over the years,” she said. “It helped me figure out who I was almost, and find a character that I was like, wow, me.”
Each of their essays were between two and four pages long and submitted in February. The students said the contest briefly left their minds after submitting—until the results arrived last week.
“I forgot about it,” Baehr said with a laugh. “Maybe for like a couple of days after submitting it, I was thinking about it, and I was kind of nervous. But I really just forgot about it since then.”
Bradley, 17, added, “It was totally shocking. It was like a thought just popped back into my head—like, ‘Oh, I got this insane award. That’s insane’.”
Faughey, who has seen many student writers throughout her career, said she was impressed, but not surprised.
“I’m just so proud of them,” she said. “I don’t know if I would say I was surprised, because I’ve been so impressed with these students and their writing the whole year. They’re just exceptional students and writers, so I’m really glad that they get this recognition.”
According to the three juniors, the recognition from NCTE has helped the students view themselves as more well-rounded writers.
“It was definitely a boost of confidence being like, Okay, I’m on the right path,” Baehr said. “Sometimes I think as a writer, you kind of doubt—like, am I just making really bad pieces? But then when you get something like this, it reassures you.”
Bradley, who considers himself more analytical than introspective, said, “Getting recognized for an essay that was about a personal narrative was really nice to kind of affirm that I am, in fact, capable of writing something like that.”
For Lisa, who considers herself more of a creative writer, the award was a revelation.
“I was thinking, like, oh, this is just a small little essay. I’ll just type it out and see how it goes. And then to win this wonderful award—it helped me see, hey, I might not be so bad at personal narratives as I thought I was.”
For more information about the NCTE and their work, visit ncte.org.
