Silver Quill places in ASPA and MDCSPA

Silver Quill was awarded first place with special merit by the American Scholastic Press Association (ASPA) for its 2009-2010 edition, "Ink Track." In addition, nine individual Silver Quill submissions placed in the Maryland-District of Columbia Scholastic Press Association (MDCSPA) contest.

The ASPA is a national student publication contest, according to Silver Quill Editor-in-Chief Alessandra Mantovani. "We submitted the entire book," she said. "It's judged as a whole."

According to Mantovani, the ASPA will mail critiques to Silver Quill in late January. Judges will offer advice on page design, story layout, graphics, headlining, cover design, advertising placement, and photography. "We're going to take all the critiques from the previous year and apply them to this year's publication," she said.

According to Silver Quill 2009-2010 literary editor Cindy Sui, Silver Quill began encouraging its contributors to submit their individual pieces last school year. "We generally get those group or whole-magazine awards, I believe," she said. "A rather new thing we started doing was to start submitting individual pieces to CSPA, MSPA, etc." Individual Silver Quill submissions placed in multiple categories of the MDCSPA, including poetry, computer-generated and hand-drawn artwork, photography, cover design and inside page design.

For Mantovani, the awards reflect the hard work of the Silver Quill staff and its contributors. "I think we worked really hard, especially in the end of the year," she said. "We stayed in for a lot of hours on Sundays for submissions for these places."

2010 MDCSPA winners:

Poetry
1st – Joanna McKee

Computer-generated Illustration/Artwork
1st – Jenny Zhang
2nd – Cole Turpie

Photography
2nd – Colin Wiencek
3rd – Wenting Ma

Cover Design
2nd – Jenny Zhang and Wylie Conlon

Inside Page Design
1st – Danny Rosenberg
2nd – Jenny Zhang

Hand-drawn Illustration/Artwork
2nd – Xinhong qiu

Editor's note: Colin Wiencek is a Photo Editor for Silver Chips Online