CONTRIBUTED PHOTO MHS Junior Deanna Hernandez shows off her Honorable Mention from the Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards, which recognizes creative teens from across the country for their artistic and literary talents.

Local writer and MHS Junior Deanna Hernandez caught the national spotlight recently for her prose prowess after she brought home an Honorable Mention from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for her personal essay, “La Letra Dedicada a mi Odio” — The Letter Dedicated to My Hate.

Founded in 1923, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards have recognized creative teens from across the country throughout the past century with notable former recipients ranging from Sylvia Plath to Andy Warhol.

A moving and candid memoir chronicling her own life experiences, “La Letra Dedicada a mi Odio” sees Hernandez shed light on the darker, more taboo aspects of her Hispanic upbringing and dealing with generational trauma as a Latina.

In her essay she writes, “My culture is beautiful and it also has its rough edges. I love my culture, which is something you should not doubt, but ideologies and standards have broken me and others that I have chosen to call my family. We are all victims of this society and our cultural traumas.”

After being nationally honored, Hernandez says the acclaim for her intimate self-portrait has not only helped validate her own feelings and work as a writer, but it also has helped her find her own voice as a young adult.

“This piece has a lot of my resilience and vulnerability in it. So, for it to get praised, it feels like I’m being heard, not just by my community here in Marshalltown, but by other people, and other communities outside of Iowa,” Herenadez said. “I feel very, really honored to have this award and be able to say that I have this award, and people are listening to me, and they’re willing to listen to me.”

A longtime creative, Hernandez admits her literary journey was not a simple upward trajectory.

“Since elementary school, I think writing and having a lot of creativity has been one of my many perks, but throughout middle school at Lenihan, I kind of got distant from writing. It was kind of sad, knowing I wasn’t writing that much anymore,” she said.

Though she was still an avid journaler, Hernandez says once she entered high school, she found more “opportunities to have a safe place to write in.”

“I started to get out of my comfort zone and start reading more about my emotions, and my culture, and about my life experience,” she said.

Here, she found the space to look more closely at her own life experience and examine her thoughts and feelings about it at a deeper, more personal level.

“I wanted to be able to come with a stronger mindset. So that’s kind of why I started focusing on the looked down upon aspects of my culture, and I started speaking about them more with my friends and my family,” Hernandez said. “Not attacking people, but using my voice to call people out because they’re not used to it. And when I did that, other people started speaking about it, and other people started talking, feeling more comfortable talking to me about these dark, looked down upon aspects. It felt good, and so that’s why I kind of started writing about it also, because if people want to listen, then maybe they want to read about it too.”

She was bashful about receiving her award, saying she never really anticipated any type of honor or recognition for her initial work.

“I was getting my emotions out there and trying to see how, whether good or bad, I would have been able to grow from it,” Hernandez said. “But I just wanted to see what kind of outcome I would get from it. It was just kind of one of those, ‘Let’s just do it and see what happens’ (things).”

She said the process behind writing the piece became a cathartic experience when she originally penned it to feature in the University of Northern Iowa’s newspaper, “The Northern Iowan.”

“It was kind of chaotic,” Herenandez said, “Since I was in a very chaotic environment, writing it during school, it was very therapeutic. I was just listening to myself and reflecting on myself, and just writing everything down that came to my mind, any thought, any memory, any chaotic thought that I wrote it down, and I figured out how to involve it into my story.”

Hernandez’s English teacher Jocelyn Frohwein said she thinks, “the sky’s the limit” for her pupil, but hesitated to endorse Hernandez’s description of herself as “chaotic.”

“I think that I wouldn’t say chaos, I would say capable resiliency,” Frohwein said. “I think sometimes when we have a lot of things that happen in our lives, and that creates a lot of decisions really fast when we’re young. I think that she stays very busy with positive interactions at school.”

While Hernandez mulls post-high school education and career possibilities, she stays busy with a range of activities at MHS, particularly the school’s student-led feminist writers club, “Mujeres.”

Though she has weighed a career in social activism and political science, Hernendez says regardless of where she lands in the future, this certainly will not be the last of her writings.

“I’m definitely not going to stop writing,” Hernandez said. “I’m definitely going to continue because I learned from my mistake of stopping, and because I love writing so much.”

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Contact Nick Baur at 641-753-6611 or nbaur@timesrepublican.com.