High Bluff Academy students win honors in Elie Wiesel Writing and Visual Arts Competition

This winter, High Bluff Academy’s English 10 Honors and English 11 classes studied the Holocaust and read Elie Wiesel’s Night, the harrowing memoir of Wiesel’s year in Auschwitz as a teenager. The unit culminated with students entering the Elie Wiesel Writing and Visual Arts Competition, a highly competitive contest in its 25th year, for middle and high school students, sponsored by the Holocaust Commission of the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater, Virginia. The theme for this year’s competition highlighted iconic leaders for human rights, such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Lewis, as well as unsuspecting heroes such as Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel himself. Students were asked to reflect on their own experiences as witnesses to our time in history and fighting for social justice.

Two High Bluff Academy students, Simone Lyons and Anna Brown, were winners in this year’s contest, which drew nearly 1,000 entries. Simone won third place for her poem “Hushed,” which tackles the issue of sexual harassment, and Anna won an honorable mention for her sculpture “2020 in Hindsight: Unmasking the Year.” Both will be part of the 2021 Virtual Art Show and the Holocaust Commission’s page for competition winners for years to come at holocaustcommission.jewishva.org/home-page/elie-wiesel