Congratulations to the student winners (pictured above with family members and keynote speaker Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner)!
Watch the live stream of the event on facebook!
Read their essays (linked below) and listen to the scholarship winners on KBOO radio: More Talk Radio 4/23/18
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
The writing scholarship is open to all Oregon 11th and 12th grade students in Oregon. The 2018 topic was, "What would it take to eliminate nuclear weapons in your lifetime?" We received more than 200 entries from across the state. Learn more below:
Announcing the 2018 Scholarship Winners
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:
More About Our Panel of Judges
This event is free open to the public. Donations to support Oregon PSR will be gratefully accepted.
This event is cosponsored by:
Ceasefire Oregon Education Foundation
OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon
Oregon Chapter of the Sierra Club