On March 1, the Palo Alto City Library reopened the annual Elizabeth Stewart Writing Contest for submissions, open to students in grades 3 through 12.

The contest originated in 2008 and had been managed by Elizabeth Stewart, who was the Youth Services Librarian at Palo Alto City Library, since 2015. According to Heidi von Mayrhauser, the current Youth Services Librarian, Stewart was well-known for her storytimes and organization of children’s programs.

“She was just beloved by people,” von Mayrhauser said. “There are still pictures of her in the library, and we have a plaque of her in the Treetop Room.”

Stewart passed away from cancer in 2022. The contest was renamed the Elizabeth Stewart Writing Contest in her honor.

The prompt for this year’s contest is, “You are a lighthouse keeper, and you keep receiving mysterious messages in bottles.” Submissions are divided into three primary age categories (elementary, middle, and high school), have a maximum of 500 words and can be in any writing medium. The deadline for the contest was April 12, and winners will be announced on May 15. Alongside the announcement of the winners, the library will hold a finisher’s celebration to recognize all the participants.

To create the prompt, the Palo Alto City Library staff submitted their ideas individually and then selected their favorite one as a group. One of the goals with this, von Mayrhauser said, is to excite staff about the contest as well. She hopes that children can have fun and express their creativity with the prompt.

“I want to have more opportunities for kids to do creative writing; that’s something I was passionate about as a kid,” von Mayrhauser said. “I don’t know how much kids in school are able to have time for that anymore.”

Von Mayrhauser says that the contest is an opportunity for students to get their creative works out into the world. At the end of the contest the staff plans to print all of the submissions, collect them in a binder and display them at the libraries for people to see. 

Maya Sriram, a two-time second-place winner in the writing contest, said that the contest gave her new opportunities to expand her creative writing experience.

“I’d always been interested in writing, but I think the majority of the writing I do is ‘silly’ in nature… [like] spin-offs of existing narratives or short pieces that are based on something else,” Sriram said. “I think [the writing contest] was the first time I took a prompt on its own, just one sentence, and built an entire narrative and world and system for it.”

Sriram participated in the contest as a junior and senior in 2023 and 2024, writing short stories for the prompts both times. Sriram had found through the contest the passion and imagination for creative writing that von Mayrhauser had also hoped for.

“I’ve learned that I enjoy writing in a more poetic, abstract sense,” Sriram said. “I like writing from scratch.”