Over the next several days, we'll be posting the winners and runners-up to the 2006 Lantern Essay Contest for you to read. You can already read the first prize winner's entry. This year there were fewer entries than last year (150 as compared to 279), but that I suspect was because we didn't get entire high school classes entering! The quality of entries overall was higher, and it was nice to see that we still had quite a few entrants from overseas. We had expanded the range of topics people could write on, hoping we'd get a wider variety of essays; and we did.

Unfortunately, we learned that one of the winners had had her essay potentially accepted for "This I Believe" on National Public Radio and, therefore, made herself ineligible to win. The lesson for all you future essay contest winners is that you only enter one essay for one medium at a time.

For all those of you who didn't win this time, then there's always next year. We'll be announcing our categories for the 2007 Lantern Essay Contest in September.