This year, the National English Honor Society invited chapters to showcase their creativity and passion for English language arts through the Bulletin Board Award. This award recognizes outstanding bulletin board displays that promote the mission of NEHS, highlight literary achievements, and celebrate the power of language in visually compelling ways.
We’re proud to announce the 2025 winners, whose displays stood out for their originality, artistic execution, and meaningful engagement with the NEHS community. These chapters used their school spaces to inspire readers, elevate writers, and make literature come alive for their peers.
Congratulations to this year’s Bulletin Board Award recipients!
Jose Marti STEM Academy, New Jersey
Our Women’s History Month Bulletin Board showcases a series of letters written by our NEHS inducted members to various female figures who have had a great impact on both the Women’s Rights Movement and other significant reforms in present-day history. Ranging from First Lady Michelle Obama to the selfless Harriet Tubman, our bulletin board aims to emphasize the importance and continued effect that all these women have had on our generation and all those to come. We designed our board with the idea of having all these personalized letters bursting from the envelope placed at the very bottom of the board, and images of all the women written to are scattered throughout these meaningful words. We made sure no movement went unrecognized—whether activism for female education with Malala Yousafzai to remarkable scientific discovery with Marie Curie—and even coordinated a social media event to further highlight their contributions to history and humankind itself.
Trumbull High School, Connecticut
Our Women’s History Month bulletin board features popular authors who have published under pen names. A pen name, also known as a pseudonym or nom de plume, is an alternate name an author uses instead of their real name when publishing. For centuries, women have used pen names in a male-dominated literary world as protection from the harsh realities of literary spaces, where women’s words don’t always hold the same weight as men’s.
We utilized a quill pen, feathers, and birds as symbols in our board design. The quill pen features feathers with the pen names of authors such as Mary Westmacott (Agatha Christie) and E. Lockhart (Emily Jenkins). We then depicted the freedom that comes with writing under one’s own name with birds labeled with the real names of the authors.
This Women’s History Month, we look to authors like Gloria Jean Watkins, known by her pen name bell hooks, to remind us that all women are valid and legitimate in their existence. We can use the power of our voices to create literature and “place[s] in the world where people can engage in one another’s differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility.”
Stephen T. Mather High School, Illinois
Our bulletin board, Poetry and Place: Diverse Voices of Chicago, is inspired by National Poetry Month and focuses on poetry, identity, place, and language. We selected a diverse range of poets with strong Chicago ties, many of whom have been shaped by Chicagoans, some are even CPS graduates. After researching and vetting each poet, we constructed an interactive board featuring QR codes linking to poetry readings and interviews, as well as a fun mini game inviting students to respond with their favorite poems. To add visual and symbolic depth, we included white, gold, and royal blue origami cranes: white represents pure truth as recognized by the National English Honor Society, gold signifies excellence and nobility of spirit, and royal blue reflects our school pride at Mather High School. Our goal was not only to spotlight these powerful voices but to celebrate poetry’s role in reflecting our city’s layered identities.
Bear Creek High School, Colorado
Our bulletin board celebrates Black History Month by highlighting three influential figures in the arts: Scott Joplin in music, Jean-Michel Basquiat in painting, and Zeb Powell in sports. Joplin, born in 1868, helped shape the Harlem Renaissance with his iconic ragtime compositions like “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer.” His music still resonates today, featured in carnivals, bars, and online. We included a handmade paper piano and QR codes linking to his music to honor his legacy. Basquiat began as the street artist “Samo” before becoming a major voice in Neo-expressionism. His bold, abstract works explored race, identity, and social justice. Inspired by his painting Bird on Money, we recreated a background in his style and added bookmark-sized prints of his art for classmates. Zeb Powell, the first Black snowboarder to win X Games gold, is known for his creativity and advocacy for inclusion in snowboarding. We made mini snowboards from tech decks to engage viewers and celebrate his impact.
National English Honor Society
The National English Honor Society (NEHS), founded and sponsored by Sigma Tau Delta, is the only international organization exclusively for secondary students and faculty who, in the field of English, merit special note for past and current accomplishments. Individual secondary schools are invited to petition for a local chapter, through which individuals may be inducted into Society membership. Immediate benefits of affiliation include academic recognition, scholarship and award eligibility, and opportunities for networking with others who share enthusiasm for, and accomplishment in, the language arts.
America’s first honor society was founded in 1776, but high school students didn’t have access to such organizations for another 150 years. Since then, high school honor societies have been developed in leadership, drama, journalism, French, Spanish, mathematics, the sciences, and in various other fields, but not in English. In 2005, National English Honor Society launched and has been growing steadily since, becoming one of the largest academic societies for secondary schools.
As Joyce Carol Oates writes, “This is the time for which we have been waiting.” Or perhaps it was Shakespeare: “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer . . .” we celebrate English studies through NEHS.
National English Honor Society accepts submissions to our blog, NEHS Museletter, from all membership categories (students, Advisors, and alumni). If you are interested in submitting a blog, please read the Suggested Guidelines on our website. Email any questions and all submissions to: submit@nehsmuseletter.us.
