Betty Wilkins is the 1st place winner of Streetlight’s 2022 Essay/Memoir Contest

Rewind.

By September 2002, I had been out of college for nine months and the student loan officers were calling to collect my […]

I spent a month in Europe in 1998, doing research for a novel I was planning to write (and still plan to finish). The trip brings back memories, some delightful and others regretful. Often, both had to do with […]

Whenever I say that my extended family camps together in the summer—living in tents, cooking over the fire, and bathing in the river—someone will ask, “And you all get along? For a whole week?”

Sure, I say. […]

In the summer of 1967, the year of my high school graduation, the Newark, N.J.-adjacent town of Plainfield, where I grew up, exploded with race riots. I was in Washington, D.C. when it happened, working as a G-2 […]

The 2022 Streetlight Essay/Memoir contest has concluded. I’m happy to announce our winners: Betty Wilkins, Catherine Childress and Susan Valas. All three essay impressed our judges with their strength of narrative […]

The Moroccan village was the same color as the surrounding hills and empty desert. The landscape had three primary colors: sandy tan, sky blue, and, occasionally, palm tree green. The young couple, tourists […]

When Stevie Nicks was a witch in Florida, I sent her letters on stationery purchased from the canteen.

The new girl at the youth residential center told me her mother was Stevie Nicks, and also a witch. I […]

I wasn’t going to make it. I’d made a mistake; this whole stupid backpacking thing was a mistake. I trudged a step further. A young guy, about thirteen, with Keanu Reeves hair and an Osprey backpack loosely per […]

I’ve noticed that when I get together with friends, we never ask each other, “Did you see [fill in the title of a television program that recently aired]?” as those of my generation once might have. Rather, the […]

I’d met three of the Partons: Randy and Stella at a festival in Georgia when I was a kid and Dolly at a concert, where I snagged backstage passes from a friend who knew one of the backup singers. I recalled my p […]

We met the ram yesterday. The one we were warned about but had forgotten was loose in the world.

After the biblical rains, the world felt charged as if pages in time had fallen open. With gaps just w […]

It is well into night, and she moves slowly. Her sword pierces the water that slides away like sheets of ice. Bubbles spin into small vortices that carry her forward. She pushes the water, and the water pushes […]

During the 1970s, I volunteered to answer phones at two different telephone crisis centers, in two different states, one in Ohio and the other in Massachusetts. When we picked up the phones at these centers, my […]

Timing is key.

I was thirteen when I told my dad that I wanted to learn how to make his special potato salad. He grinned and handed me a knife and a five-pound bag of russet potatoes. “Peel these, and then c […]

Our house, built in 1738, stood in the middle of twenty acres of corn field. The hand-fitted Pennsylvania blue-gray fieldstone walls were two feet thick. George Washington used it as an infirmary for his troops […]

I can’t tell if it’s a naturally recurring feature of my post-mastectomy slog, or just another variation of my chronic struggle to feel relevant. Four weeks out from surgery I stare at my screen and write sen […]

I stared at the thick frosting of the cake, dotted with rainbow sprinkles, wondering if this would be what made him sick. I’d messed up the recipe, not realizing that “pasteurized egg whites” were diffe […]

Carole Duff has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Essay/Memoir Contest

“I love a piano, I love a piano, I love to hear somebody play . . .”
From Irving Berlin’s Stop! Look! Listen […]

Naomi Raquel Enright has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2021 Essay/Memoir Contest
I am the brown-skinned, biological mother of a son presumed to be white. My mother is Ecuadorian and my father was […]

I’m amazed and delighted every time we hold Streetlight’s Essay/Memoir contest to see how many wonderful submissions we get. The only sorrow is that we can’t give out more than three cash awards. But, we can offer […]