Olivia Foshee of Oxford High School received first place honors for the 1997 Eudora Welty Writing Contest. The contest, founded by Frances Patterson of Tupelo, is open to Mississippi high school students and includes a $500 prize for top honors and $250 for second place. Foshee's poem "Lightbulb" utilizes strict and restrained imagery reminiscent of Emily Dickinson. Judy Jones is Foshee's writing teacher at Oxford High.

Charles Johnson of West Point High School garnered second place with his poem "Little Black Boy." The poem employs rhetorical repetition, making it akin to Walt Whitman's style. Johnson was unable to attend last summer's award ceremony because he was working in Washington, D.C. His writing teacher at West Point High is Anita Keys.

Aleda Shirley served as judge for this year's contest. Shirley, an author and a member of the University of Mississippi's English department, says the winners' poems are exceptional because of their concern with language: "So often, with young writers, their need to express themselves overwhelms their concern with the method of that expression. Not so with Olivia and Charles; one can see, in their work, a concern with not just what is being said, but with the way in which they are saying it."