Voice/Craft
Voice/Craft, sponsored by Parkland College’s Division of Art & Sciences, is a program designed to nurture and celebrate the distinctive voices of the District’s middle-school students. All students who submit work to Voice/Craft receive personalized feedback and notes of appreciation from the editorial committee, which also chooses representative original works to publish in book form. This collection assembles together all submissions to the program organized by year, including those not selected by the editorial committee for publication. We think you will agree that the writers and the works included here demonstrate extraordinary creativity and insight and show that District 505 students are benefitting from excellent writing instruction. We wish to thank, especially, the teachers who have put in the hard work of nurturing these students and their writing and have made this collection possible by encouraging them to submit their work.
See the Voice/Craft Homepage for more information.
Current Volume: Volume 1 (2026)
Introduction
Schools represented in this issue: East Prairie Middle School Unity Junior High School Paxton-Buckley-Loda Junior High School Heritage Junior High School Next Generation School Countryside School
Fiction
Blooming Pride
Elli Hubner
Sh! You're Not Alone
Waylon Buchanan
Legend of the White Bison
Garrett Hurley
A One Woman Voyage
Annabelle Rafferty
Nonfiction
Meera's Mini Musings: A Collection
Meera Dande
See You in the Cosmos Literary Essay
Eugenia Chatalbasheva
New Meaning of Hope
Avery Wilcoxon
Literary Essay—Ghost by Jason Reynolds
Rico Matsumoto
The Alchemist
Suah Won
Why Should You Try Jarling's Custard Cup?
Elijah Thrapp
Poetry
Where I'm From
Alexandria Black
Picture Frame
Bryan Wang
Where I'm From
Kenneth Chapman
Stories are Weird
Hadley Kirschner