The 2021 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Awards

The awards contest (奖赛) is to encourage people to explore peace and the human spirit. There are three agecategories (类型): Adult (19&over), Youth (13-18), and Youth (12&under). The yearly contest is open to people worldwide. Your poems must be unpublished (未发表的), and in English.

Deadline

All entries (参赛作品) must be submitted (提交) by July 1, 2021.

Entry Fee

Adults--$15

Youth (13-18)--$5

Youth (12 & under)--no fee

Notes

1. You may submit up to three unpublished poems. At most 30 lines per poem.

2. Include name, address, email, telephone number, and age in the upper right-hand corner of each poem. For the Youth (12 & under) category, please also include your school’s name and your teacher’s name.

3. Title each poem.

4. Please keep copies of all entries as we will be unable to return.

5. Email your entries to: cwarner@napf.org and Click here to pay our entry fee online; or send your entries and entry fee to Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, 1622 Anacapa Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101.

Awards

Adult Winner--$1,000

Youth (13-18) Winner--$200

Youth (12 & under) Winner--$200

Winners will be announced by October 1, 2021 on our website. Winners will be notified by email and/or mail. Past years’ winning poems can be found here.

In the live-streaming (直播) channel of Yang Weiyun, no singing or dancing is performed nor are products sold. Yang teaches pinyin, reading and writing, something that has been most familiar to her for the past 50 years. The difference is her students are mostly adults.

The 73-year-old comes from Huainan city of Anhui province and is an experienced educator. She had been a Chinese teacher in an elementary school for 50 years. In retirement, Yang also wanted to do something meaningful. The rise of short video platforms gave her the idea of continuing her education attempt through live-streaming online. The retiree opened her live-streaming account in May 2021 and offered free pinyin courses designed for kindergarten pupils about to attend primary schools. However, she gradually learned among her viewers there are a lot of illiterate (文盲) adults.

Yang said she found many illiterate adults develop a sense of lack of confidence. They are afraid to go to new places, worried that they couldn’t teach their children or read their boss’s instructions. So, she added targeted content to meet their needs. “Many illiterate adults didn’t have the chance to go to school when they were young. They are the ones in urgent need of becoming literate. I wanted to give them a new starting point,” Yang said.

According to the seventh national census (人口普查) carried out last year, there are 38 million illiterate adults in China. Yang’s live-streaming channel offers an easy and private way for those who want to overcome adult illiteracy.

Yang said students learning through her live-streaming channel each have their own demands. So she always prepares her classes carefully after concluding a live-streaming session. She has tried her best to figure out what ways the students can learn and remember better, and her biggest wish now is to see these students graduate from her classes.

Who would have thought a teenager’s mobile phone could help them manage their mental health by supporting a good night’s sleep? A new app aimed at 12-to 16-year-olds is showing strong early results, improving both the hours of sleep and reducing depression and anxiety.

Sleep Ninja, a free app created by mental health research organization the Black Dog Institute, has shown significant early results in improving teenagers’ sleep patterns, so critical not just for school readiness but for overall good mental health, co-creator Aliza Werner-Seidler said.

“Adolescents struggle to get the recommended eight to 10 hours of sleep each night,” Dr Werner-Seidler, a clinical psychologist, said. “As a result, approximately 40 per cent of all young people will experience a significant sleep problem by early high school which heightens their risk of mental ill-health, which is a risk factor for a range of disorders including depression and anxiety.”

Those using the app nominate a time to be up in the morning to make it to school or other activities. From there, it work backwards, determining when they should be in bed. The app gives an alert to start a pre-bed routine, which launches at least an hour before bed time. Part of that routine is to put the phone and other devices away, and engage in behaviors more suitable to sleep. Some of this is simply to have a shower, clean teeth, read a book. But the app also offers a form of practical tips to help them establish sleep routines, things like how to set up their bedroom, what to do during the day to improve their chances of sleep and how to reduce those negative repetitive thoughts that come in at night.

Dr Werner-Seidler said Sleep Ninja was the only such app designed specifically for adolescents, and the results so far had been very encouraging. She added that we also saw rates of depression drop from 77 percent at the start of the study to 44 percent after using the app.