Sunday afternoon, a woman from Klamath Falls will walk onto the Miss America stage.
Allyssa Defillipo — Miss Oregon 2026, and the Content Coordinator who helps put this magazine together every month — competes for the 99th Miss America crown on Sunday, September 6, at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. Fifty-two young women are there, one from every state, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. One of them grew up here.
Readers have watched this coming for a while. She was Miss Klamath County in 2024 and the cover of this magazine that August, in a story about growing up with food insecurity and deciding to do something about it. She came back the next year as Miss Southern Jewel and finished first runner-up at Miss Oregon. She came back again in June 2026 as Miss Sierra Cascade, and in Seaside, on her fifth consecutive try, they called her name — the first Klamath County woman to hold the Miss Oregon title in nearly fifteen years.
She has never made the story about the crown. She is an ISSA-certified nutrition coach finishing a bachelor's degree in applied nutrition and health, she manages a local wellness clinic, and she wrote and illustrated a children's book, Why Is My Tummy Grumbling? Her initiative, E.A.T. to Live — Educate, Access, Transform — has put more than 8,000 pounds of food in the hands of the Klamath–Lake Counties Food Bank and taken her nutrition seminar to more than 800 students across the Klamath Basin. Her goal for her year of service is 5,000 students.
Miss America week is longer and stranger than the two hours most people see. The delegates arrived in West Palm Beach at the end of August. There was a sign-in ceremony, a welcome dinner, and then a week of competition spread across two venues: the preliminary night on Wednesday and the talent show on Thursday at the Kravis Center, a gala on Friday, and finally Sunday's crowning at the convention center. In between are interviews, rehearsals, and days that start early and end late. The woman who walks out Sunday evening will have been at it for ten days.
Here at home, the part that matters is simpler. Sunday's final begins at 4 p.m. Pacific, and the Miss America Organization says the show will stream live on its official YouTube channel, youtube.com/@MissAmerica. Gather whoever you like, put it on, and make some noise for her.
Whatever the judges decide, the work she is going home to is the same work she left: kids, food, and a plainly stated belief that where you start does not decide where you finish. That was true before Sunday and it will be true Monday morning.
Go get 'em, Allyssa. Klamath Falls is watching.
