SCGSAH creative writing student gets prestigious honor
Aidan Forster was already having an amazing-beyond-belief senior year.
Aidan Forster
A National Merit Finalist, he received college acceptances from Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Penn, and Cal-Berkeley, among others. (He chose Brown University, and will enroll in the fall.)
But then the U.S. Department of Education came calling and gave the creative writing senior from Taylors studying at the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities (SCGSAH) further plaudits to his credit by naming him a U.S Presidential Scholar in the Arts, one of only 20 in the nation. Aidan was nominated by the National YoungArts Foundation and will represent our state as the only arts scholar selected from South Carolina.
“Aidan is a rare combination of talent and fearlessness and intellect. With his writing, he is unafraid to push himself into unexplored areas, places that aren’t necessarily in his comfort zone. I’m not sure we’ve ever had a writer who worked as hard to get the most out of his talents … I can’t wait to see what he accomplishes in the years ahead,” Creative Writing Department Chair Scott Gould said.
Aidan will be the 8th U.S. Presidential Scholars in the Arts from the Governor’s School’s Creative Writing Department. In addition, he:
- was the inaugural recipient of the 2018 YoungArts Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award, which provides a $50,000 scholarship,
- is a 2018 YoungArts Finalist, one of 19 selected nationally for Creative Writing, and attended YoungArts Week in Miami in January,
- received two Gold Medals, one silver medal, and a Silver Medal with Distinction for his writing portfolio in the 2018 National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards competition,
- was included in the 2017 Best New Poets annual anthology of 50 poems from emerging writers, published by the University of Virginia,
- and his poetry chapbook, Exit Pastoral, was selected to be published by YesYes Books as a winner in the Vinyl 45’s Chapbook Contest. He is the youngest author to be chosen.