The Poetry Out Loud Recitation Contest, hosted by the Poetry Out Loud® program, is an annual nation-wide poetry recitation and performance competition. Since its founding in 2005, Poetry Out Loud has had over 4.4 million high-school participants from 20,000 schools. Poetry Out Loud is partnered with various organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and state art agencies. The program aims to help students improve public speaking skills, build confidence, and explore literary history through the works of talented poets. 

Each year, Flint Hill chooses school-wide winners to compete in the Poetry Out Loud state finals (and potentially national finals) through a process that starts in the classroom. “I think Poetry out Loud is a wonderful for everyone to participate in, because it’s always good to get practice speaking in front of a large group of people,” says Upper School AP Language teacher Stefanie Jochman. “Learning how to recover if you make a mistake, learning about how to take your time, use your breath, express what a word means with your voice, all of those are very useful skills no matter what career you pursue or what you end up doing in the future.” Each Upper School English class holds a local Poetry Out Loud classroom competition, where students memorize and recite a poem of choice to their classmates. One student is then nominated from each class to participate in the school-wide competition.

Classroom recitations took place throughout the month of October, and the school-wide competition was held on Wednesday, October 30th, in the Upper School learning commons. “I went to the Poetry out Loud school competition in freshman year, and going to the school competition was such an inspiring experience seeing everyone interpret their poems differently and doing it in a way that a poet would. Not only were the poems themselves very beautiful in their writing, seeing it in performance is a different art form,” says Junior Nadia Ngata, a classroom nominee who went on to recite her poem in the school-wide competition. “Thankfully, I got the opportunity to get to the school competition this year. I’m really excited to see how everyone interprets their own poems and adds their own style to it. I also think that poetry itself is important for students to do, and learn how to express themselves in different ways and be free and creative, because in that space it feels like there’s no judgment and you can just be free. I think the experience in Poetry out Loud is not just simply performing it yourself, but it’s more seeing other people perform, and seeing other people perform something how you would like to do it.”

During the school-wide competition, students were judged based on accuracy and, more importantly, performance. A total of five finalists were chosen to move onto the state finals: Sophomore Seth Stevens (who recited “Onions” by William Matthews), Sophomore Alec Sweet (“On Quitting” by Edgar Albert Guest), Junior Amber Li (“Miss you. Would love to grab that chilled tofu we love.” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi), Junior Nadia Ngata (“An Anthology of Rain” by Phillis Levin), and Senior Kieran Snow (“Art vs. Trade” by James Weldon Johnson). The exact date for Virginia’s Poetry Out Loud state finals has not been determined yet, but it will likely be sometime between February and late March of next year. The National Finals will be held in Washington, DC, from May 5-7. We wish all of Flint Hill’s finalists good luck in the upcoming Poetry Out Loud finals!