We are delighted to announce the winners of The Nation’s seventh annual Student Writing Contest. This year we asked students to send us an 800-word essay detailing what they thought was the most important issue of Election 2012. We received close to 1,000 submissions from high school and college students in forty-two states. We chose one college and one high school winner and ten finalists. 

Congratulations to the winners: Andrew Giambrone, an undergraduate at Yale University, who wrote about the human costs of unemployment and argued that the economic crisis is also an existential catastrophe; and Tess Saperstein, a junior at A.W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, Florida, who elegantly limned Susan B. Anthony’s contemporary legacy. The winners receive an award of $1,000 each; the finalists receive $200 each. All receive lifetime Nation subscriptions. 

The college finalists are: Guido Girgenti, Occidental College; Erik Lampmann, University of Richmond; Alex Ritter, Baylor University; Gabriel Schivone, Pima Community College; and Helen Yang, Princeton University. The high school finalists are Nikolas Angelopoulos, Polytechnic High School, Pasadena, California; Kathryn Davis, Claremont High School, Claremont, California; Ethan Evans, South Warren High School, Bowling Green, Kentucky; Kristy Hong, Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Massachusetts; and Audrey Yu, Booker T. Washington High School, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

Many thanks to all our applicants and to those who encouraged their participation. Here are links to the winning essays: “Joblessness Is the Most Important Issue of the Election, ” by Andrew Giambrone, and  “What I Owe to Radical Feminism, ” by Tess Saperstein.

Read all the winning essays at 2012TheNation.com/students (which also includes the StudentNation blog, a hub for cutting-edge journalism featuring exclusive reports on a wide range of domestic and foreign issues).