Gasaro Ange ’26, a King’s Academy student from Rwanda, has been selected for a 2024 Achievement Award in Writing, given by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). Her collection of seven original poems about her identity, submitted to the NCTE’s recent writing contest, earned a grade of “superior” from a panel of high school English teachers in the United States.

The NCTE Achievement Awards in Writing is a school-based writing program established in 1957 to encourage high school students to write and to recognize some of the best student writers in the nation, and internationally. This year, schools nominated 633 students. From the United States, students were nominated from 44 states, as well as Guam and Washington, D.C. Internationally, teachers nominated students from Canada, Greece, Jordan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. Two to three independent judges evaluated each submission holistically on content, purpose, audience, tone, word choice, organization, development and style.

Ange describes herself as someone who has always loved to write and who “is always looking for competitions to enter.” She discovered this contest while searching online for such competitions and was enticed by the prompt, which was based on a quotation from Michelle Obama: “If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.” Intrigued, Ange took some of her poems about her own sense of identity to Hani Elayyan, her English teacher at King’s, who encouraged her to submit them and offered feedback.

In one of her poems, Ange writes:

“Don’t lecture me about who I am. I am Rwandan. Do not look at me through lenses of divisions. The length of my nose, my height, or the vein in my hands has little to do with who I am. I am Rwandan in the marrow of my blood. My DNA curls around the scars of our tragedy, those marks of our survival and growth. My heart defies the ephemeral and resides within my roots.”

King’s Academy congratulates Ange on her impressive achievement!