2025 Student Essay Contest

Winners announced!

Congratulations to the winners and a big thanks to all of those who participated in the contest.

Please see the list of winners and read the winning essays here or download the PDF here.

* The BCAH 2025 AAPI Student Essay Contest was sponsored by the Belmont Chinese American Association (BCAA).

Bios of essay contest judges

Elissa Ely is a community psychiatrist, have written for many decades for the op-ed page of The Boston Globe, and created the "Remembrance Project" that ran on WBUR.

Amitha Jagannath Knight writes books, stories, and poems for all ages and is a graduate of MIT and Tufts University School of Medicine. Her debut picture book, Usha and the Big Digger, won the 2023 Mathical Book Prize Honor Award. Dr. Knight has lived in Texas and Arkansas, and currently lives in Belmont with her husband, kids, and cats.

Kwan Kew Lai, originally from Penang, Malaysia, a three-time recipient of the President’s Volunteer Service Award and former Harvard Medical faculty physician, dedicates time to humanitarian medical work worldwide. She is the author of Lest We Forget: A Doctor’s Experience with Life and Death During the Ebola Outbreak, Into Africa, Out of Academia: A Doctor’s Memoir, and The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly. Her work has appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The Infectious Diseases Society of America Science Speaks, MedPage Today, Literally Stories, Vine Leaves Press, Synapses, and others. She lives in Belmont. https://www.kwankewlai.com/

Susan Tan is the author of the Cilla Lee-Jenkins series (Macmillan), the Pets Rule! Early reader series (Scholastic) and Ghosts, Toast, and Other Hazards (Macmillan). All her work centers Asian American readers and characters, and her passion is creating the stories she wishes she had as a young mixed race Asian American reader. She is also an assistant professor of English at UMass Boston, and she lives in Cambridge, MA.