Lauren Ficke was delighted to find out she’d won the top prize in the Barriere Writer’s Group Writing Contest. It took the organizers of the contest a while to catch up to this talented young lady, as she’d recently moved to Kamloops. The gift basket for the top prize in the contest was donated by Barriere and Area Literacy Outreach. You can find the winning essays and poems from the contest printed in the Star/Journal issues of July 7 and 14, 2017.