Identity Challenge Winners

Sam Eliza Green has been a creator with Vocal since the summer of 2021, and has published 114 pieces — warm congratulations on their first Challenge win. Their free-flowing poem, You, and I, and She takes first place in our Identity Challenge, its short lines a conversation about being and feeling, one which inhabits emotion with exploratory language. We loved the images of a winter “when nothing feels right/ and wrong has carved/ into my skin like/ the sharp snap/ of abandonment.” Image and sensation do a slow dance that draws the reader in.

Alvin Ang’s personal essay, I Got Brutally Knocked Out—And It Was The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me is a very straightforward expression of our challenge: a description and analysis of a moment that changed the creator’s life. It’s done with vividness and clarity, so we sense every moment of anticipation, of the fight itself, its shocking result — and the difficult but eventually positive knock-on effect. This is an inspirational piece.

Praise too for our runner-up, like Prairie Johnson, whose Dear People is a letter from her 17-year-old self to all fellow humans; there are terrific lines here. We were caught right away by the opening, “Dear humans that taste sunlight like lime juice, like earth, like my own limbs do,/ I want to love you.” R. C. Taylor’s Butterfly-Skinned Girl is an ancestral hymn, a calling, full of images of hope and transformation. And Carl L Lane’s Too Black is a powerful essay that confronts racism and colorism head-on. “We knew of no world where we were beautiful,” Lane writes, but his strong prose proves otherwise. This is how the world changes, one narrative at a time.

You can check out the full list of winners HERE and learn about our current challenges below: