ROBERT J. STUCKEY ESSAY CONTEST
At its heart, The Robert J. Stuckey Essay Contest is an opportunity to engage and reward students that have a passion for writing. For our contest to be successful, we need help from Missouri’s educators. To encourage promotion and participation we provide cash awards for both students and their teachers. Please see the rules and contest details below. If you have questions, contact Matt Gaunt at
gauntm@missouri.edu. We hope to see your student’s submission in March!
Contest Rules:
- The contest is open to Missouri High School and home-schooled students, grades 9 through 12.
- Only one entry will be accepted from each school. We encourage teachers to create awareness of the contest and submit the best essay from your school.
- All essays and stories must be directly related to libraries and/or a reading experience. Essays which review a single book are not acceptable. Common topics for essays are literary analyses, accounts of personal experiences and fictional short stories.
- Each essay should have a title and be between 1,200 and 1,500 words.
- Essays should not have been submitted to any previous contest or have been previously published.
Prizes:
- First-place prize is $2,000
- Second-place prize is $1,000
- Teachers of the first and second-place winners also receive monetary prizes of $250 each
- Any honorable mentions will receive $100
Criteria for Judging:
Contest judges will be comprised of members of the Friends of the Libraries. Entries will be judged on the basis of:
- Originality of thought
- Content
- Skill in organizing and presenting ideas and in marshaling evidence
- Grammar, spelling and composition
Deadline:
- All entries should be emailed by 5 p.m. on Friday, March 28th, 2025.
How to Apply:
- Email contest submissions as an attached Word document to:
- Matt Gaunt at gauntm@missouri.edu
- Only essays submitted via email will be accepted.
- Please include the following in the text of the email: the title of the essay, student’s name, email address and home address, name of school, and teacher’s full name, email address and phone number.
- Essays become the property of the Friends of the University of Missouri Libraries upon receipt.
Contact Information:
- If you have any questions about this contest, please contact Matt Gaunt at gauntm@missouri.edu.
Archive of Previous Winning Stuckey Essays
- 2024 Winner: Amelia Favazza, “Fancy Nancy and the Frightful French Class (Featuring Adolescent Angst)”
- 2024 Runner Up: Jayden “Keean” Choe, “Pronunciation”
- 2023 Winner: Lillian Yanagimoto, “An Elegy for Headquarters”
- 2023 Runner Up: Xiangyi Wang , “From-To-To-From-What-Freedom-Is”
- 2022 Winner: Mary Schwanke, “17850 Hours”
- 2022 Runner Up: AJ Wildhaber, “Dead Name”
- 2021 Winner: Ryan Copeland, “Eulogy to My Childhood“
- 2021 Runner Up: Emma Behrman, “The Asian Main Charater”
- 2020 Winner: Addison Rinehart, “A Pessimist’s Reading List”
- 2020 Runner Up: Marina Firman, “Growing Up with Books”
- 2019 Winner: Nancy Hulslander, “The Power of a Novel”
- 2019 Runner Up: Grace Whitaker: “Books as Bridges”
- 2018 Winner: Brice Jansen, “The Card Catalog of Myself”
- 2018 Runner Up: Kaylen Hayward, “Literature and Mutability of Language”
- 2017 Winner: Raechel Tittor, “More Than A Thousand Words”
- 2017 Runner Up: Lauren Slatterly, “A Time of Struggle, Complimented by Books”
- 2016 Winner: Brice Jansen, “The Girl in the Library”
- 2016 Runner Up: Andrew Sweeso, “On Truth and Literature”
- 2015 Winner: Connor Penrod, “Pillars”
- 2015 Runner Up: Abby Lammers, “The Persistence of Seuss”
Who was Robert J. Stuckey?
The late Robert J. Stuckey was a member of the 1963 junior class of Farmington High School. He was vitally interested in current events and enjoyed reading. He had a natural facility for architectural drawing and was also interested in music. Like most young men, Robert was interested in sports, particularly wrestling. This annual contest is presented in memory of Robert.