You’re going places

Last month, she “managed” to read at least 36 books. Her adoration of the printed word began in the second grade, and flourished into authorship in the eighth. She loves music, but prefers musicals above all else, and her current fixation is Hamilton, a rap musical about founding father Alexander Hamilton’s life. She played the Queen of Heart’s First Lady in this year’s winter play Alice in Wonderland. She’s Junior Grace Roady; writer, actress, and believer of the empowerment of words.

As a freshman, Roady wrote a County Writing Contest first place poem, the piece she’d later excitedly give to her eighth grade English teacher Nora Dixon for revising. When Roady was a Sophomore, she wrote an essay about a true story, one that she had personally experienced one night during Fall with her father,entitled “An Autumn Night”, entered it into the same contest, and again won first place, securing two first prizes within her first two years of high school. But none of that, she deemed, would have been achievable without the encouragement and praise of Dixon.

Roady recalled the first time she’d shown Dixon one of her works, her poem mentioned before, and how her words affected her. “I’ll never remember the entire words exactly,” Roady said, “but I had just finished writing my first story, and I handed it in to my teacher, and whatever she said, from that moment forward pushed me to continue writing.”

Dixon had been a driving force in Roady’s life ambitions, someone who helped give her the confidence to continue writing, and who still inspires her to pursue it as a career. “I can’t imagine doing anything else other than writing or acting.” Roady explained.

“She helped me so much.” Roady said. “She said, “You’re really going places, Grace, with your writing. You can go so far with it, that you probably can’t even be able to imagine where you’ll go with it.”