MANA's COMMEMORATIVE WRITERS' CONTEST WINNERS

MarketingNewAuthors.com is pleased to announced the winners of its Commemorative Writers' Contest.

• The First Prize goes to Cara Williams for her essay, "Freedom, It's Free."

• The Second Prize goes to MariaGuia de Leon for her poem, "What America Left Me."

• The Third Prize goes to Barry Carter for his poem "A Country Contradicted."

Writers were asked to submit entries about one of the following themes:

1) What does the word "American" mean to you?

OR

2) What makes being an American complex?

Thank you to all those who submitted! Everyone who submitted an entry made this contest a valuable opportunity to encourage writers to reflect on their experience in this very unique 250-year-old country.

MANA will post the remaining winning entries over the next two months. 

Third Prize winner: 

A Country Contradicted

by Barry Carter

I pledge to flags I've never fully known, a land stitched loud from immigrant and thief, where freedom's psalm is sung in different tones depending whose ancestors bore the grief.

I love the highway's promise, wide and bright, the diner coffee, strangers who say hey—and still I carry names erased from sight, the debts we owe but never learn to pay.

We built a house on words we don't yet keep: that all are equal, all deserve a chance, while half its rooms are locked, and some still sleep outside the door we dressed in grand romance.

So I am proud and grieving in one breath—this country teaches life by naming death.

________________________________________

Second Prize winner:

What America Left Me

by MariaGuia de Leon 

I went to America with a camera—
intent on keeping the red brick,
winter breathing against glass,
a gray skyline leaning into frost.

I photographed everything I feared forgetting.
Then a glass shattered.

I stood among the shards, waiting
for the question I knew by heart:
Who will pay?

Instead, a woman looked at me and asked,
Are you hurt?

Years later, I remember the question
more than her face—a stranger’s kindness
arriving before judgment.

I remember a hungry man
refusing my leftover pizza with a quiet smile,
protecting the last small country
that belonged to him.

That was when I learned:
dignity sometimes sounds like no.

I remember cities—Boston to Las Vegas,
Broadway neon, cable cars, gray deserts—
each place giving care a different name.

Then I came home.

My camera fell before I could save
what it had seen.
No cloud. No backup.
Only an empty card and the quiet certainty
that some things do not return.

For a while, I thought I had lost America.
But memory is sly.

It keeps what photographs miss:
a question, a refusal,
the way a kind voice asks after a bruise.

America was never a picture to keep;
it was the frame that changed what I saw.

I came home with an empty lens—
and somehow, carrying more
than I had brought in.