Annabel Taylor

Walt Whitman High School

Annabel Taylor is a fiction author and award-winning student journalist. After years of drafting and revision (and lots of coffee), her young adult fantasy novel Legacy is set to be released in mid-2027 with The Wild Rose Press. Her narrative writing, which also includes short stories, essays and poetry exploring heritage and identity, has earned distinction in The New York Times Tiny Memoirs Contest and won regional awards from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the Baltimore Science Fiction Society and Bethesda Urban Partnership.

In her writing, Annabel seeks to uplift outsiders and underdogs, searching for the untold narratives of people who have been disadvantaged throughout history yet still manage to persist and defy the odds. Annabel is especially inspired by how historical events shape personal lives and family dynamics, pushing her to navigate her own family’s history by fictionalizing her great-grandfather’s memoirs of the hardships of colonial Vietnam.

Get to know more about Annabel and her writing journey!

“Writing is how I conceptualize life events by adding drama, flair, and imagination to the otherwise mundane. It’s very important to me that my main characters are outsiders or underdogs. I want to represent those groups in my writing — people who have been disadvantaged throughout history but persist, lift others up and defy the odds.” read the full blog

✍️ Excerpts of Annabel’s Work

Tourists look down from high perched balconies,
Oblivious at what lies beneath the beauty
They bask on our beaches
Where the driftwood is weathered and yellow like the skin of plantains
Where the peppercorn sand is raw and black

– Sweet and Sour Smells

The courtyard was verdant, a playground of bonsai topiaries and white lotuses which bloomed even in a downpour. A white lady Buddha built from porous stone sat in the center. The Monk’s house was adjacent to the temple, a townhouse with long patterned carpets and bowls of fruit inside. Bullets of rain seemed to pierce through the tin roof, acting as a lullaby during my prayer. I would sit with my knees folded under me with my bare feet scuffing against the threadbare rug. Ash dripped down my fingers from the red incense stick clasped between my hands.

– Half and Whole

Runner-Up

Charis Wong

Walter Johnson High School

Whether it’s a small detail or an abstract concept, the things that compel me to write are random. I rarely approach a blank Google Doc or paper definitively knowing what I’m going to put down. Instead, I let a different part of my mind take the reins—the subconscious that bridges both my deeper thoughts and whatever’s at the forefront of my brain. I let my fingers alternately hover and race across my keyboard, drawing from whatever unknown well of inspiration or shreds of thought they instinctively know.

I often write about the small things in life, as well as what constantly goes unnoticed and unseen—the things that we have to really look for in order to perceive. I try to articulate the essences of relatable feelings or experiences, like the sensation of time slipping through one’s fingers, being lonely while not alone, and wondering about the elusive unknown. But I also strive to illustrate what’s going on in my own mind, what’s hard to express, what no one can understand, but what my words can brush and begin to explore.

Writing, whether poetry or just an unedited stream of consciousness, brings to the surface a more genuine part of myself that doesn’t get to breathe or speak otherwise. And when I read my writing, it gives me a small sense of solace that there is something that gets me—a glow of possibility that what hides inside me can be captured and shared.