2018 Greenfield Peace Writing Scholarship Awards Ceremony

We hope that you will join us, the high school student winners of our 2018 Greenfield Peace Writing Scholarship, and Marshallese anti-nuclear and climate activist and poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, our Keynote Speaker, in an evening of poetry, reflection, and engagement on nuclear weapons elimination.

Watch the live stream of the event on facebook!

The writing scholarship is open to all Oregon 11th and 12th grade students in Oregon. This year's topic is "What would it take to eliminate nuclear weapons in your lifetime?" We've received a record number of entries, more than 200, from across the state, and our distinguished panel of judges have made their selections, as follows:

Announcing the 2018 Scholarship Winners

1st Place: Anisha Arcot, West Linn High School

2nd Place: Corey Griffis, Oregon City High School

3rd Place: Trevor Moler, Tigard High School

Honorable Mention: Paul Malecha, Lincoln High School, Portland

Honorable Mention: Emma Stewart, Sam Barlow High School, Gresham

Read their essays (linked above) and listen to the scholarship winners on KBOO radio: More Talk Radio 4/23/18

We Received Entries from Throughout Oregon

This year, we received a record number of entries, more than 200, from high school students throughout Oregon. The map below pinpoints where we received entries from:

More About Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Our Keynote Speaker

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is a poet and spoken word artist of Marshallese ancestry. She received international acclaim through her poetry performance at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in 2014. Her writing and performances have been featured by CNN, Democracy Now, Mother Jones, the Huffington Post, NBC News, National Geographic, Nobel Women’s Initiative, and more. In February 2017, the University of Arizona Press published her first collection of poetry, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter.

Kathy also co-founded the youth environmentalist non-profit Jo-Jikum dedicated to empowering Marshallese youth to seek solutions to climate change and other environmental impacts threatening their home island. Kathy has been selected as one of 13 Climate Warriors by Vogue in 2015 and the Impact Hero of the Year by Earth Company in 2016. She received her Master’s in Pacific Island Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

From February 10th-28th, 2018, Kathy was on a voyage to Runit Island, where 85,000 cubic metres of radioactive waste were buried by the United States in the late 1970s. This journey aligns with her mission of using poetry and media to highlight the nuclear legacy and trauma that Marshallese people have experienced.

Watch some of Kathy’s nuclear weapons-related spoken poems here:

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