A Monument Academy Graduate Wins a Denver Woman’s Press Club Scholarship

Isabelle Vigueria did not apply for the scholarship she won. The Monument Academy graduate entered the first chapter of an unfinished novel in the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, took a regional Gold Key and a national Silver Medal, and over the summer the Denver Woman’s Press Club came looking for her. The $2,500 goes straight to tuition at the University of Wyoming, where she started this fall.

“I actually didn’t apply for it — the DWPC found me,” Vigueria said.

The Denver Woman’s Press Club gives three scholarships a year, each worth $2,500 toward college tuition. Vigueria, of Monument, shares this year’s awards with Rosaline Nizam, a poet pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Colorado Boulder, and India Johnson, an eighteen-year-old author from Westcliffe. Nizam received the club’s Ruth Murray Underhill Award, which since 1985 has gone annually to a University of Colorado student for creative writing. The club announced the three winners in July and honored them at its Denver clubhouse on Aug. 4, where each read from her own work.

A Thanksgiving tale in three acts

The assignment was a satirical short story of 500 to 1,000 words. Vigueria turned in a three-act play.

“I started by making a list of people I thought I could satirize, and then I built characters around them,” she said. “Once I had my cast, I realized I had way more characters and ideas than I could fit into a short story, so I decided the only reasonable thing to do was put them all in a play.”

The result, “A Thanksgiving Tale,” is a Thanksgiving riff on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Its protagonist is a high school student named Michael Evil, who is, in Vigueria’s description, “well, rather evil,” and who meets a series of ghosts after eating mushrooms he finds in the woods. The supporting cast includes Satan, Davy Crockett and a drag queen named Rhoda Dendron. “I thought I was so clever for that,” she said.

The play has never been staged or read aloud. Her English teacher and a few friends have read it. She got an A.

Eight years of group stories

Vigueria and her best friend have been writing what they call “group stories” since fifth grade. The method has barely changed in eight years, though the technology has: they started by emailing each other and now text or call. One of them brings an idea — a character, a set of characters, sometimes only a scene or a setting — and the two of them build it out in a shared Google document, usually late at night and sometimes starting after midnight.

On descriptive passages they alternate paragraphs. On dialogue they split the cast and write at each other. “I will say we’ve gotten exceptionally good at writing banter or a fight scene,” Vigueria said.

“After eight years of doing this, we’ve gotten pretty good at knowing where the other person is going with an idea, even if they haven’t fully explained it yet,” she said. “Most of our stories are completely ridiculous, but that’s kind of the point.”

What she read at Monument Academy

Vigueria took every Advanced Placement English and history class Monument Academy offered, played three seasons of varsity basketball and graduated as valedictorian. Asked what changed how she writes, she named three books assigned in her last two years.

Hamlet, she said, “deepened my thirst for the existential.” The Brothers Karamazov gave her “an even greater appreciation for complicated family dynamics and the name Fyodor.” The Old Man and the Sea “taught me a lot about how much you can say with very little, which is something I’ve tried to carry into my own writing.”

“I think that’s probably the biggest thing I took away from all of those books,” she said. “There isn’t one right way to tell a story.”

Thirty-seven words before falling asleep

A valedictorian’s course load and three basketball seasons leave little uninterrupted time, and Vigueria said the useful thing she learned was to stop waiting for any.

“One thing I learned this year was that ‘writing’ doesn’t necessarily mean sitting down for three consecutive hours and whipping up hundreds of words at a time,” she said. “Sometimes it meant writing a paragraph in my Notes app on the way to a game and transcribing it later. Sometimes it meant the 37 words I was able to write before falling asleep at 3 a.m.”

She kept academics first, she said, and learned “to take advantage of whatever time I could find and trust that even a few sentences were progress.”

Vigueria also volunteers at Covenant Grace, her church in Colorado Springs, with a ministry called Imago Dei, which she said “seeks to demonstrate and communicate God’s Word to people who may process or learn differently, including individuals with special needs.” She called it “a really meaningful way for me to serve others and be involved in my church community.”

The Camaro in the barn

The 1977 Chevrolet Camaro that the press club’s announcement mentions came off Facebook Marketplace the summer before Vigueria’s sophomore year. It had been sitting in a barn for years, and, she said, “I think the barn may have even been on fire at some point.”

She and her father spent the next year and a half getting it back on the road. They stripped the paint and left the car in primer until this past spring break, when they painted it with help from her grandfather and her brother. It runs. She did not take it to Laramie, and she does not intend to sell it.

Her father taught her the work; he had grown up doing it with his own father and brothers. “I learned a lot of the practical stuff from him, but I also learned how to be patient and figure things out when something didn’t go according to plan,” she said. “A lot of the memories I have of the car are really memories of working on it with my dad, which is probably why it means so much to me now.”

Wyoming, and scripts

Vigueria is majoring in history at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, with a minor in honors, and hopes to teach history. She is looking forward to the dorm, the classes and the new people; the dining hall has been the one disappointment. She is nervous about the work piling up. “I’ve always been a procrastinator,” she said.

The novel whose first chapter won the Scholastic medal is nearly finished. What she wants to write after that is scripts — television, film or theater. “I really like the idea of writing something that can eventually be brought to life by other people,” she said.

The $2,500 goes to tuition, which she said is a relief for her family and means she can take additional classes over the summer.

Asked what she would tell a younger Monument Academy student who wanted to write, Vigueria said she would start with “that’s amazing,” and then get practical: “Even the ideas that seem terrible now are worth writing down. They might not end up being good at all, but at least you’ll have something to laugh at later.”

The club behind the money

The Denver Woman’s Press Club was founded in 1898 and keeps a clubhouse at 1325 Logan St. in Denver. It describes itself as a gathering place for professional women journalists, published authors and communications professionals, and counts the education of the next generation of women writers among its stated purposes.

It runs three named scholarships. The oldest, the Frances Belford Wayne Merit Award for a college journalism student, was initiated in 1940 and has been funded, by the club’s account, for more than half a century. The Ruth Murray Underhill Award, established in 1985, honors an anthropologist, poet and University of Denver professor who published the first known narrative of a Native American woman’s life. The third goes to Colorado high school writers recognized in the national Scholastic Art and Writing Awards — the route by which the club found Vigueria.

The money comes from member donations, the club’s Colorado Gives campaign and community grants. This year a grant from an organization called “100 Jews Who Care” funded a full scholarship, the club said. Estelle Meskin chairs the scholarship committee; donations to the fund are taken at dwpconline.org.

Sources & further reading

The Independent’s own coverage: School Spotlight: Monument Academy, the Charter That Rebuilt Its High School — the Independent’s profile of the school Vigueria graduated from, whose high school reopened in 2020.

The club’s record: The DWPC Announces 2026 Scholarship Winners, July 11, 2026 · DWPC scholarships, which describes the three named awards · Denver Woman’s Press Club

Entities: Monument Academy · University of Wyoming · Denver Woman’s Press Club on Colorado Gives · Town of Monument

Quotations from Isabelle Vigueria come from an interview conducted by email on Sept. 5, 2026, and are reproduced as she wrote them. Details of the award, the reception and the club come from the club’s July 11 announcement and from a press release supplied by Amy Norton, its communications chair, on Sept. 2. Where the club’s materials and Vigueria’s own account differ, this article follows her account.

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