Author: Milton Magazine

Writing awards were bountiful this spring for numerous creative and nonfiction writing students. Of the 28 Milton students who earned 45 regional scholastic writing honors in January, five were recognized at the national level. Caroline Bragg ’21 won a gold medal for flash fiction, Erika Yip ’20 won a gold medal for poetry, Sarah Hsu ’19 won a silver medal for flash fiction, and Clara Wolff ’19 won a silver medal for poetry. Notably, Akua Owusu ’19 won a silver medal with distinction for her writing portfolio, which consisted of nonfiction essays and eight pieces of poetry. “One of the essays I wrote for my nonfiction class,” Akua says. “It’s about my father and his immigration story of coming to America from Ghana. It’s also about how I think about success and living up to expectations. When I first started writing in my English classes, it was hard to write about personal stuff, but now I’m comfortable writing about stuff closer to home. You gain confidence in yourself.” Erika’s gold-medal poem was informed by her “new role as an upperclassman, inspiring me to rethink how previous years’ experiences shape my identity today.” “When We Are Old Enough” is an ode both to childhood summers and to mourning the loss of innocence as one grows older. The poem depicts scenes of purity and the speaker’s growing attraction to the mysteries...

Along with computer science faculty member Chris Hales, Milton’s programmers attended the Teen Hacks LI Hackathon in Long Island, New York. Aaron Lockhart ’21, Sebby Park ’21, Tim Colledge ’21, and Aaron’s friend built an app called BiParse, which indicates whether a given article has a liberal or a conservative bias. They earned first place in the competition. Sur+, built by Zack Ankner ’20 and Alex Rodriguez ’20, lets users donate a certain percentage of every payment they make to a charity of their choice. They earned third place. Miriam Zuo ’20, Kendelle Grubbs ’20, and Shiloh Liu ’22 built Find Your Reps, an app that allows Americans to learn about their local representatives. James Perreault ’21 built CensorFlow, a parental-controls app for Google Chrome. Ben Botvinick ’21 teamed up with a friend from Philadelphia to build Charity Banner, which allows web developers to donate income from their web traffic to...