MIHS Creative Arts Magazine ‘Pegasus’ Wins REALM First Class Award

Mercer Island, WA, January 16, 2024 — The Mercer Island High School Creative Arts Magazine ‘Pegasus’ has achieved a Recognizing Excellence in Art and Literary Magazines (REALM) first class award from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).

This is the highest possible rating from REALM.

The Pegasus staff, part of the high school’s College and Career Readiness (CCR) Writing and Publishing class, worked incredibly hard on the final publication. The award includes criteria such as: 

• Recognizing a wide variety of student voices
• Overall quality and creativity of selected pieces within the publication
• Having a consistent design carried throughout
• Evidence of attention to detail and careful editing

The Lead Staff of Pegasus includes MIHS students Liam Chester (Editor in Chief), Madison Liu, Cora Marquardi Pirzio-Biroli, Varenna Ronald, Vic Rodman, Ethan Chernicoff, Fei Campos, and Gigi Lee.

This year, schools in 46 states and five countries nominated 375 student magazines. Magazines from middle school, high school, and higher education were welcomed for the 2023 contest. 108 magazines were awarded the contest’s highest distinction, REALM First Class.

The REALM program publicly recognizes excellent literary magazines produced by students with the support of their teachers. REALM is designed to encourage all schools to develop literary magazines that celebrate the art and craft of writing. Schools in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, US territories, Canada, and American schools abroad are eligible to nominate magazines.

For more information about the REALM Program, please visit: https://ncte.org/awards/program-to-recognize-in-student-literary-magazines/

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education. As the nation’s oldest organization of pre-K through graduate school literacy educators, NCTE has a rich history of deriving expertise and advocacy from its members’ professional research, practice, and knowledge. NCTE is the home of the Intellectual Freedom Center, the National Day on Writing®, ReadWriteThink.org, the Build Your Stack® initiative, and NCTE Verse. NCTE supports nearly 20,000 teachers across the preK–college spectrum, with a mailing list of over 500,000, more than 100,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter, and regularly sees more than 100,000 visitors in web traffic monthly.

For more information, please visit www.ncte.org.