Our High School Student Short Story Contest Returns… with a Twist

What good story doesn’t include a twist, right?

For this year’s high school student short story contest, our “twist” is in what we’re using to help inspire the students’ work.

In past years, we’ve had one of the festival’s published authors write three opening lines from which the students could choose to start their 1,000 words or fewer story. This year, we decided to let high school students inspire each other…

Members of the GBF community reviewed more than 100 pieces of artwork (paintings, drawings and photographs) created by Montgomery County Public Schools high school students as part of the 2014 annual art show sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Montgomery County Campus and chose our three favorites to serve as the inspiration for this year’s short story entries.

The photographs we chose are:

photographer: Bill Wu, Winston Churchill High School

photographer: Bob Herbert, Rockville High School

photographer: Lauren Levy, Northwest High School

We’re excited to see how using photographs for inspiration changes the nature (and variety) of the stories we read and to hear what the GBF short story contest community thinks about our shaking this up this year. We’d love to hear your thoughts, too! Comment below.