ANGELA NICKOLAS, 17, daughter of Peter and Frances Nickolas of North Gorsuch Road in Westminster.

School: Graduate of Westminster High School, entering Mount St. Mary's College this fall.

Honored for: Being one of 700 winners nationwide of the National Council of Teachers of English Awards in Writing.

Her English teachers selected her to enter the contest. She reworked a story she wrote as a sixth-grader, called "Continuous Nightmare," based on a legend she heard while traveling with her parents in Turkey. She also was required to write about something important that happened to her. She wrote of surviving an auto accident.

Goals: She will major in writing and rhetoric at Mount St. Mary's and is interested in a career in journalism.

Comments: "It made me look at life differently," she said of the accident.

Her other writing often has been inspired by the traveling she has done with her family, which is from Greece.

"In sixth grade, when everyone else was writing about their dogs and cats, I was writing about Turkey," she said.

Her story, "Continuous Nightmare," is a mystery set in The Eye of Sofia, now a mosque, but once a church. Legend has it that when the Turks invaded the area, once a part of Greece, and took the church, one priest locked himself in a room and refused to come out.