Five Rochester-area students won prizes in the 2026 Sokol H.S. Literary Awards Contest:
They also received personalized, engraved award trophies/plaques.
In an email, Jiang wrote that her performance piece “is a direct response to global circumstances, criticizing the bystanders that not only aid culprits by keeping quiet, but ultimately harm themselves in the process too.”
Joshua Pettinger, the performance judge, who owns and operates Wicked Squid Recording Studios, wrote, “‘Karma is Dead’ evokes feelings of hopelessness and despair through graphic and violent metaphors. … What is truly profound about this piece, however, is how it wrestles with the idea of culpability.”
Jiang’s winning prose entry explores her Asian and American identities and how she made peace with herself, she wrote.
“How can a person define themself without succumbing to others’ voices? You explore this question and more with beautiful language that feels poetic at times,” prose judge Tokeya C. Graham, a professor in the English/philosophy department at Monroe Community College, wrote to Jiang.
“Where the Lion Sleeps,” the second-place winner that is a short story set in the ancient Hanging Gardens of Babylon, “offers strong writing coupled with vivid and engaging description,” Graham wrote to Grove, citing its “lush imagery and historical flair.”
Graham wrote to McHenry about her third-place essay, “The Forearm’s Dance”: “One of the most compelling elements of your writing is how you make the reader pause and feel the physicality of music. Through your words, our bodies become both instrument and conductor.”
Chen’s first-place poem “stood out to me immediately for its clarity of voice and its striking imagery,” Charles Coté, the poetry judge, wrote. He is a psychotherapist, a poetry instructor at Writers and Books and the author of two books.
Coté wrote that Grove’s second-place poem, “Hymn of Steel,” “distinguished itself through the power of its atmosphere and the intensity of its imaginative vision. … The poem is rich with tactile and visceral detail.”
Grove wrote in an email: “This poem explores the lives of a labour of moles struggling to survive in an industrial, urban environment. Through sensory imagery, the poem explores the contrast between the natural world the moles used to inhabit and the harsh, mechanical city they now must endure. This poem reflects on environmental disruption and resilience among animals, many of which suffer from habitat fragmentation and toxic contamination.”
Contino’s “use of rhyme and meter is particularly effective,” Coté wrote about the third-place winner, “The Puppeteers Mascread.” “… I was also drawn to the poem’s rich symbolic language.”
The Friends and Foundation of the Rochester Public Library has sponsored a high school writing contest since 1958. In 1985, Eli and Mildred Sokol established an endowment so that the foundation could provide award money to the winners and honoraria to the judges. Eli Sokol had been a trustee of the Friends since 1983.
How to read winning entries
Thanks to the FFRPL’s partners at The College at Brockport, the complete collection of Sokol Award-winning entries since 2015 can be viewed and downloaded at SUNY Brockport’s Open Access Repository, https://soar.suny.edu/collections/edfb7c68-15e6-4bd9-be3f-8d4844b2fa99. This year’s winning entries and the judges’ comments also can be read at https://ffrpl.libraryweb.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2025/09/Sokol-booklet-2026-1.pdf.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Five Rochester students earn top literary awards
Reporting by Rochester Democrat and Chronicle / Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
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