Yana Clio M. Campos, the author of Arrows of the Mind, was raised in Manila with her younger brother. She wrote her prehistoric coming of age short story a month after her fifteenth birthday, as a gift to her future, and is now in the ninth grade at The Meridian.

I’d appreciated literature and the art of writing but I’d never written a short story before. When we found out about the competition, I wasn’t sure if I was interested, but I eventually agreed, because I could add it to my college portfolio. I did not know what I was doing, but I found myself enjoying it. Reading my story after every revision, each better than the last, made me excited to write more. After my experience with the Young Author Competition, I learned to appreciate written works for their form and composition as well as their content.