Three students from Windham County will travel to the Barre Opera House on March 9 to compete in the 2016 Vermont Poetry Out Loud State Competition. These young people will meet students from other Vermont high schools to vie for the State Championship in the national poetry recitation competition. The state winner will compete in the National Competition in Washington, D.C., in May.
“The Poetry Out Loud program not only connects students to an incredibly diverse literary heritage, it fosters the kind of transferable skills and confidence they will need to succeed in college, career, and life,” said Erika Lowe, Vermont Arts Council education programs manager, in a news release.
These students are already champions, having won their individual high school's competition and thus a spot in the State Competition. The students are Kaya Dean of Brattleboro Union High School, Megan Kehoe of Twin Valley Middle High School, and Jocelyn Trendell of Vermont Academy.
The students competing in this year's Poetry Out Loud State Competition represent 36 Vermont high schools. More than 5,400 Vermont high school students participated in classroom contests and winners proceeded to school competitions. School champions will recite at the semifinals in Barre.
From there, 10 students will be selected to compete in the finals on March 17 at Vermont PBS in Colchester. The winner of the Vermont State Competition then goes to the National Finals in Washington, D.C., where he or she will compete against champions from every state in the country.
The Poetry Out Loud program was created by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, and is administered statewide by the Vermont Arts Council. Now in its 11th year, Poetry Out Loud has inspired hundreds of thousands of American high school students to discover and commit to memory classic and contemporary poetry.