Welcome to the Stone Soup Honor Roll! We receive hundreds of submissions every month by kids from around the world. Unfortunately, we can’t publish all the great work we receive. So we created the Stone Soup Honor Roll. We commend all of these talented writers and artists and encourage them to keep creating. – The Editors Scroll down to see all the names (alphabetical by section), including book reviewers and artists. ART Lilian Jean Newton, 11 POEMS Valerie Huang, 7 Maya Jimenez, 6 Miriam Kubo, 10 Mason Li, 9 Avery Shaughnessy, 11 FICTION Luisa Lamb, 11 Ayush Parmar, 11 Yueling Qian, 11 Kyla Tavares, 12
March 2023
Highlight from Stonesoup.com
From the Stone Soup Blog The following is a transcript of part of the second installment of Emma’s poetry podcast. Head over to our blog at Stonesoup.com/young-bloggers/ to listen to it or read it in full! Poetry Soup (A Poetry Podcast) — Episode #2 Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Each episode, I’ll discuss a different poem and poet. Today, I’ll be talking about two different poets—one real and one fake. Can a poem be written by someone who doesn’t even exist? “The Keeper of Sheep” is written by Alberto Caeiro, which is a heteronym invented by the poet and writer Fernando Pessoa. A heteronym is different from a pseudonym because a pseudonym is just a name, while a heteronym is an entire personality. I’ll talk more about the heteronym Alberto Caeiro later. But first, a little bit about Fernando Pessoa. Fernando Pessoa was born on June 13, 1888, in Lisbon, Portugal. When Pessoa was six years old, he made up his first heteronym, a man by the name of Chevalier de Pas. Pessoa created at least seventy-two heteronyms throughout his lifetime. Pessoa was a poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher. He was deeply influenced by English poets like William Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley. You can also see the influence of Walt Whitman in much of Pessoa’s work, including the poem we’ll be reading today. Fernando Pessoa died on Nov. 30, 1935, in Lisbon, Portugal, at the age of 47. But now there’s another poet to talk about: Alberto Caeiro. In creating Caeiro, Pessoa had to come up with a whole new personality with an entire history. Caeiro has had only a grade-school education—he is a peasant who is in touch with his surroundings and is greatly influenced by them, yet not curious about their existence. According to Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro does not question the things around him—he has interesting ideas, but he simply takes in his surroundings without asking “why.” Speaking in the voice of another heteronym, Ricardo Reis, Pessoa said, “Caeiro, like Whitman, leaves me perplexed. We are thrown off our critical attitude by so extraordinary a phenomenon. We have never seen anything like it. Even after Whitman, Caeiro is strange and terrible, appallingly new.” The perspective of the poems changes based on the personality of the heteronym Fernando Pessoa might be writing under at the time. Octavio Paz even called Caeiro the “innocent poet.” Head to our website to read or listen to the rest! About the Stone Soup Blog We publish original work—writing, art, book reviews, multimedia projects, and more—by young people on the Stone Soup Blog. You can read more posts by young bloggers, and find out more about submitting a blog post, here: https://stonesoup.com/stone-soup-blog/.
Reading with My Sister
The narrator recalls quiet mornings reading with their sister When I was four years old, I moved to America with my mom and older sister and brother. I remember the first year being very strange and different from our life back in China. We didn’t have a car, so we had to walk everywhere we went, and coming from a walkable town, we were unaccustomed to everything being so far apart in the suburbs. All around, there were people we’d never met, and it was hard for us to communicate with anyone outside of our family because we barely knew how to speak English. My older brother was already in high school and very busy, so this made it even more important to spend time with my sister. When school started that first year for her, my sister began to read me picture books in the mornings. We’d sit together on the slightly crooked front steps of our new house as she waited for the school bus, and she would trace her finger over the illustrations as she read to me. I remember that the mornings smelled like freshly cut grass, and the leaves swayed in the trees above us. I loved being with my sister, and reading with her helped me feel less empty when I didn’t have anyone to play with after she left for school. Dream Dream Once I got to kindergarten, we had less time to read together, and as time went on, we had completely forgotten about it. I would really like to read again with my sister. Now, years later, she is about to go to college next year, and I feel sad thinking about not reading again with her. Thinking about those mornings together brings up a lot of bittersweet feelings! Sometimes I wish I could reverse time just so I can experience reading with her on those sunny days again, and I feel sad that I will see her so much less next year. I can’t stop that from happening, but you readers who have siblings might still have time to spend wonderful days together, reading and laughing. So, what are you still doing reading this? Go outside and read with your family!
