The Complete Guide to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards (2027 Edition)

If you're a teen writer in the United States, Canada, U.S. territories, or on a military base, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards are almost certainly the most consequential competition you'll consider entering this year. The program has been running since 1923 and has handed early validation to a startling number of writers you've heard of — Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Tracy K. Smith, Lena Dunham, and on and on. Many recent winners are now publishing in the magazines you'd hope to publish in someday.

So if you're considering an entry — or if your parents are reading this and wondering what you've been muttering about for the past three weeks — this guide is the version we wish someone had handed us.

What the Scholastic Awards Actually Are

The Awards are run by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, a nonprofit, and the program is open to teens in grades 7 through 12 (ages 13 and up). You can enter art, writing, or both. On the writing side, there are categories for poetry, short story, flash fiction, novel writing, personal essay & memoir, critical essay, journalism, science fiction & fantasy (now renamed Speculative Fiction for the 2026 cycle), screenplays & scripts, and a few others.

There are also portfolio categories, which are reserved for graduating high school seniors. A senior portfolio consists of eight pieces of writing that share some kind of cohesive vision — more on portfolios in a separate post, since they're worth their own deep dive.

Entry fees are $10 for individual works and $30 for portfolios. Fee waivers are available — and the program means it. If the fee is a barrier, you take the waiver, no questions asked.

How the Judging Works (and Why It Matters)

The Awards run on a regional-then-national structure that's worth understanding before you submit anything.

Regional round. Your work is first judged at the regional level by an Affiliate Partner that covers your geographic area. There are roughly 100 of these Affiliates across the country — some cover entire states, some cover specific cities. Regional judging produces three possible recognitions. A Gold Key represents approximately the top 3–5% of submissions in your region. A Silver Key comes next. An Honorable Mention is the third and lowest level of regional recognition.

It's worth pausing on this. A lot of teen writers fixate on National Medals and treat the regional round as a stepping stone, but that math doesn't hold up when you look closely. With hundreds of thousands of entries received every year, landing a Gold Key in a competitive region is itself a serious accomplishment. So is a Silver Key. Collecting a handful of Gold and Silver Keys across multiple categories is a stronger signal to admissions officers, teachers, and future editors than most people realize — arguably a stronger signal than a single National Medal in one category, depending on the portfolio you're building.

National round. Only Gold Key winners advance to national judging. At the national level, work is reviewed by a panel of established writers, editors, and educators — and the recognitions become Silver Medal, Gold Medal, and the small handful of top-tier awards (American Voices, Best-in-Grade, the Gedenk Award, the Civic Expression Award, the Herblock Award, etc.). National Medals represent roughly the top 0.4% of all submitted work, which is why they carry the weight they do.

A few things worth knowing about how this works:

The judging is done without knowing your name, age, school, or anything else about you. Judges see only the work. This matters more than it sounds like it should. It means your recognition doesn't depend on the admissions-brochure version of you — what school you attend, what your essay topic sounded like on paper, whether you'd be easy to root for. The work is what gets read. If the writing holds its own, you get the medal.

Regional standards vary. A piece that wins Gold in a less-saturated region might earn Silver or Honorable Mention in NYC, where the entry pool is enormous and the bar is brutal. Don't take this as a reason to be discouraged — take it as context. The recognition you receive is partly a function of who else submitted in your region that year, which is worth understanding when you read your results.

The Calendar You Need to Know

For the 2026 cycle:

• October 1, 2025 — Submissions open.
• December 2025 through early January 2026 — Regional deadlines. These vary by region. The earliest is December 1; some regions go as late as January 6. Check your region's deadline at artandwriting.org, because missing it by a day means missing the entire cycle.
• January 28, 2026 — Regional results are announced. Check your portal account.
• March 25, 2026 — National results are announced.
• June 9–11, 2026 — National Awards Week, held in New York City. Gold Medalists and select scholarship winners are honored at a ceremony, traditionally at Carnegie Hall.

The 2026 Updates You Should Know About

A few things have shifted for the current cycle that returning entrants might not realize.

The Humor category has been removed. Work that would have gone there can now be entered in Short Story or Flash Fiction. Science Fiction & Fantasy has been renamed Speculative Fiction, which is more accurate to what the category has actually been judging for years. Dramatic Script is now Screenplays & Scripts. None of these changes are dramatic, but if you're sitting on a piece you wrote two summers ago, double-check that it still fits where you remember it fitting.

The other significant update is the AI policy. As of July 2025, the Awards permit AI as a brainstorming or outlining aid, but they do not allow AI-generated final work, and they will rescind awards retroactively if it surfaces. The entry process now asks you to disclose how you've used AI tools. Used in accordance with the policy, this won't affect your eligibility — but be honest, and document your process so you can show it if anyone ever asks.

What the Awards Actually Get You

The recognition matters, obviously. So does everything that follows from it, which is worth being concrete about because different parts of the prize matter differently depending on what you're trying to do.

On the practical side: National Medalists are eligible for scholarships up to $12,500, and Gold Medalists appear in the annual Best Teen Writing anthology. The ceremony in New York — traditionally at Carnegie Hall — is something you'll remember, and honestly the cohort you meet there tends to matter longer than the medal itself. I still know people from that week. We still send each other poems.

For college admissions, regional and national recognitions both belong on your activities list. Admissions officers know what the Scholastic Awards are. A National Gold Medal in writing — particularly in a portfolio category — is a credential that materially differentiates a creative writing applicant. A regional Honorable Mention is still worth listing; it's not load-bearing on its own, but it signals that you've been engaging with the work seriously.

The Writing Categories: A Quick Walkthrough

Before we get into strategy, it's worth knowing what each of the nine writing categories actually is — and which of yours belongs where. This trips up a lot of first-time applicants.

Critical Essay. Analytical writing about a text, a work of art, a film, a social phenomenon, or an idea. These are the pieces that most closely resemble what you write for English class, but the strongest entries push beyond the five-paragraph mold into genuine argument. If you've written a killer essay on a novel for AP Lit, that piece probably belongs here.

Flash Fiction. Fiction under 1,000 words. The best flash fiction isn't just a truncated short story — it's a form that uses its compression to do something a longer piece couldn't. If you have a piece that lives in a single moment or turns on a single image, flash is where it goes.

Journalism. Reported writing. Interviews, features, profiles, investigative pieces, op-eds. If you write for your school paper or have written a longer reported piece about your community, this is your category.

Novel Writing. For writers working on longer projects. You submit an excerpt (plus a brief synopsis) rather than the whole thing. Note that the excerpt needs to work on its own, which is harder than it sounds.

Personal Essay & Memoir. Nonfiction rooted in your own experience. Not a college essay — these are literary essays, where the form has room to do what it wants. Memoir pieces, personal essays that open outward into something larger, hybrid work that blends personal narrative with reporting or argument.

Poetry. Exactly what it sounds like. You can submit a single poem or a small grouping of up to three poems as one entry. Poetry is one of the most competitive Scholastic categories, partly because it's one of the most accessible — a lot of teen writers submit poems.

Screenplays & Scripts. Formerly called Dramatic Script. Work written for performance: stage plays, screenplays, teleplays. Must follow standard industry formatting. If you've taken a playwriting class or written a short screenplay for a film class, this is the category.

Short Story. Fiction over 1,000 words, up to around 3,000. The workhorse fiction category. Most of the fiction in Best Teen Writing comes from here.

Speculative Fiction. Formerly Science Fiction & Fantasy. Any fiction that departs meaningfully from our current reality — sci-fi, fantasy, horror, slipstream, magical realism. If your short story has a dragon or a space station or a ghost, it probably belongs here rather than in Short Story.

Writing Portfolio (graduating seniors only). The big one. Eight pieces submitted as a unified body of work, judged as a whole. A Senior Portfolio Gold Medal comes with a $12,500 scholarship and is among the most prestigious recognitions the program offers. We have a full separate post on building portfolios if you're putting one together.

How to Decide What to Submit: Volume for Regionals, Quality for Nationals

Here's the framing that actually matters. The Scholastic Awards run in two distinct rounds, and the strategy for each round is different — in some ways almost opposite.

At the regional level, you're fighting for visibility in a massive pool. Over 350,000 works are submitted each year. Your goal in the regional round is to maximize the number of shots you take at a Gold Key, because Gold Keys are what advance to the national round, and because Gold Keys are themselves valuable recognitions on your activities list, your literary résumé, and — over time — in your college applications.

This means the best strategy for most serious teen writers is to submit as many strong pieces as you can across as many categories as you can. If you write poetry and short stories, submit in both. If you've also written a solid personal essay, submit that. If you have a reported piece for your school paper, journalism is a real category and it's often less saturated than poetry or short story.

This also means submitting revised versions of work you've already produced, rather than trying to generate brand-new work specifically for the competition. The one hard rule: if a piece has already won a National Medal in a previous year, you can't resubmit it. But a piece that won a regional recognition and didn't advance? Revise it and send it again. A piece you drafted for a workshop in tenth grade that still has something in it? Revise and submit. The judges don't know which pieces are new to you and which have been on your hard drive for a year. They know what's on the page.

At the national level, the game changes entirely. Now you're competing against the top 3–5% of all regional submissions, and the judges are looking for work that does something the strongest regional winners couldn't quite do. The volume strategy stops working. Only quality scales here.

This is where the work of refining a piece genuinely matters — where the difference between a Silver Medal and a Gold Medal can come down to how a poem turns in its last three lines, or whether a short story's middle pulls its weight, or whether an essay stops narrating long enough to actually think. The pieces that earn National Medals have usually been revised at least four or five times, often with the help of a mentor or an instructor who reads teen writing for a living.

This is exactly what we do in our one-on-one creative writing mentorship at ellipsiswriting.com. Last year, between 70% and 80% of our one-on-one creative writing students earned at least one Gold Key — and our students' Gold Key to National Medal conversion rate was about 65%, roughly 6.5x the typical rate among all Gold Key winners nationally. That gap is almost entirely about refinement. The students whose work advances aren't necessarily the students who started with more talent. They're the students who got closer to finished before they hit send.

So: submit a lot at the regional level, and submit revised-to-a-high-finish at the national level. If you only remember one thing about Scholastic strategy, let it be that.

A Few Category-Specific Notes on What Wins

Even within that broader strategy, a few quick notes on what tends to do well in specific categories — worth factoring in when you're deciding which pieces to send where.

For poetry, single-poem submissions should be the one whose first three lines pull a reader in and whose ending lands with some kind of force. Grouped submissions should feel like they belong in conversation, even if the topics differ.

For short story and flash fiction, the cleanest entries tend to be the ones with a clear arc — an actual beginning and an actual ending, with real movement between them — rather than vignettes or fragments. This is true even though some of the most interesting contemporary fiction does the opposite. The thing to understand is that judges reward execution, and execution is harder to pull off in an experimental piece than most teen writers realize. If your experimental piece is executed at a high level, it can absolutely win. If you're not sure whether the execution is there, submit the more conventional piece.

For personal essay & memoir, what tends to win is honest writing that actually sits with the material. The strongest essays in this category are almost always the ones where the writer stops narrating what happened long enough to think on the page — about why it happened, what it meant at the time, what it still means now. The dramatic stuff is the setup. The examining is the essay.

For critical essay, the winning pieces tend to push beyond the five-paragraph structure into something more essayistic — more like the criticism you'd read in a literary magazine than the criticism you'd write for a grade. If your piece reads as a thesis defended in three body paragraphs, it's probably not quite there yet.

For journalism, the pieces that stand out are reported — meaning they involve actual interviews, actual sources, actual time spent in the world. Opinion pieces can work, but reported features and profiles tend to do better.

For screenplays & scripts, formatting matters more than in any other category. If your script isn't in standard industry format (Fountain, Final Draft, Celtx all produce it), that's a strike against you before the judges have read a word. Get the formatting right, then let the writing do the work.

What If You've Never Done This Before

Then your job is just to enter. The Scholastic Awards exist partly to introduce teen writers to the experience of submitting work for outside judgment, and the act of doing it well — choosing what to submit, revising it carefully, formatting it correctly, hitting the deadline — is itself one of the most useful things you'll do as a writer this year. Whether you win anything or not, you'll have done the thing.

Most teen writers who eventually publish books and win the bigger awards started by entering the Scholastic Awards and not winning. They entered the next year, and sometimes the year after that. This is the normal path.

A Note on Mentorship

Reading the entry guidelines and choosing what to submit is one thing. Knowing whether what you have is competitive — and whether it's competitive in your region versus nationally — is another. So is knowing whether your poem ending lands or your story's middle is sagging.

This is the kind of thing we work on with students one-on-one in our mentorship program. If you'd like another set of eyes on your portfolio before you submit, that's exactly what we're built for. You can find more information at ellipsiswriting.com.

Whatever you decide, submit the work. The writers who eventually get read are the writers who keep putting the writing in front of readers. Start now.