In 2024, I was also honored by The Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC) as a first-place high school winner in their National Student Writing Contest. The prompt, themed “Tell Us Who They Are,” asked students to write from the imagined perspective of unidentified figures in historical portraits.
My poem was inspired by “Girl with Straw Hat”, ca. 1868 by François Bernard. It was displayed alongside the painting in the “Unknown Sitters” exhibition at HNOC. This exhibit focused on portraits of individuals whose identities had been lost or erased from the historical record, often due to social, economic, or racial biases in archival documentation.
When I encountered Girl with Straw Hat, I observed that the sitter was posed in a white dress, holding a straw hat adorned with flowers—elegant, preserved, and unnamed. Her eyes, however, betrayed the composure expected of a well-kept European girl of the 1800s. There was a restlessness in her gaze, almost a plea. It felt as though she was asking me to give her voice. So I did.
I wrote from her perspective, imagining the weight she bore in silence, the inequalities around her she couldn't name, and the longing to resist what history had asked her to be. My words were placed beside her portrait—two girls in conversation, one in oil, the other in ink.
Click the link to view my featured work on the HNOC Youtube Channel.