PMHS freshman earns national writing award

peyton cassel (3)
Penn Manor High School freshman Peyton Cassel

Congratulation to Peyton Cassel, winner of a Silver National Medal in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards – the first such honor earned by a Penn Manor student since 2006!

The Penn Manor High School freshman joins such luminaries as Sylvia Plath, Andy Warhol and Truman Capote in earning a national Scholastic Award. Only 1 percent of the nearly 320,000 works of art and writing submitted in this year’s competition earned a national award.

Peyton is being honored for her collection of poems, including “Urban,” “Rosaline,” “Blood Sister,” “Because You Asked About the Line Between Children and Adults” and “The Testimony of a Dishonest Man.”

Earlier this year, she earned a Scholastic Gold Key award for her poetry collection and placed first in the Newspapers in Education editorial competition. She also earned an honorable mention and $100 prize in the 2015 International Ocean Awareness Student Contest.

In 2014, Peyton’s fictional story about the Salem witch trials earned first-place honors in the senior fiction division of the Hershey Story History Contest.

Peyton recently was named Student of the Month for March at Penn Manor High School.

A member of the Penn Points newspaper staff, she also participates in the Penn Manor marching, jazz and concert bands, chorus and orchestra.

She is the daughter of Steve and Jennifer Cassel of Woods Edge.