Shawnee High School crowned its first ever poetry champion earlier this week.
Destiny Crowley won first place in the school’s Poetry Out Loud contest.
Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry recitation contest sponsored by The National Endowment for the Arts and the Oklahoma Humanities Counsel.
Five students competed for top honors and now Victor Moore, Lord Stormwalker, Logan Davis, Kameron Grant and Destiny Crowley are the newest members of the performance poet fraternity.
The contest was organized by members of the SHS English faculty, Dr. Marian Salwierak served as the prompter for the performers, Jeremy Burnett tabulated the judge’s ballots and E. Bruce Bushong organized the event and served as the emcee.
Destiny Crowley was the clear winner but the runner up spot was hottley contested, with Logan Davis taking second place and Lord Stormwalker in third.
The contest was judged by people not associated with SHS and included, Anne Sadberry, Lucille Lever and April Wilkerson.
Ms. Sadberry has taught English for 20 years, including students from Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Ecuador, France and Panama.
Ms. Lever has taught English as well as Drama for over 30 years and participated in poetry recitation competitions in her childhood in South Africa.
Ms. Wilkerson is an avid poetry reader and writer and is a business reporter for the Journal Record after a 16 year career as a reporter with the News Star.
After a nervous first round the poets settled into their routines and moved the audience with their performances.
“I found myself crying, twice!” Mr. Bushong said.
For the students this is the first ever poetry recitation contest for SHS.
Each student had to choose two poems to memorize and recite from a list of poems provided by the contest sponsors.
The choices can be found at www.poetryoutloud.org.
The champion, Ms. Crowley, chose the free verse poem “Discrimination” by Kenneth Rexroth and an envelope quatrain poem called “Time Does Not Bring Relief: You All Have Lied” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
After the contest was over the students asked if they could “... do this again.”
The students were clearly excited about what they had done.
Dr. Salwierak mentioned that the Freshman English teachers discussed having a competition just for freshmen as part of teaching their poetry section.
“I hope we can have classroom champions and then have each of them compete for the title of Freshman Poetry Champion.” Mr. Bushong said.
Everyone involved voed to make the contest an annual event.
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Shawnee High School crowned its first ever poetry champion earlier this week.
Destiny Crowley won first place in the school’s Poetry Out Loud contest.
Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry recitation contest sponsored by The National Endowment for the Arts and the Oklahoma Humanities Counsel.
Five students competed for top honors and now Victor Moore, Lord Stormwalker, Logan Davis, Kameron Grant and Destiny Crowley are the newest members of the performance poet fraternity.
The contest was organized by members of the SHS English faculty, Dr. Marian Salwierak served as the prompter for the performers, Jeremy Burnett tabulated the judge’s ballots and E. Bruce Bushong organized the event and served as the emcee.
Destiny Crowley was the clear winner but the runner up spot was hottley contested, with Logan Davis taking second place and Lord Stormwalker in third.
The contest was judged by people not associated with SHS and included, Anne Sadberry, Lucille Lever and April Wilkerson.
Ms. Sadberry has taught English for 20 years, including students from Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Ecuador, France and Panama.
Ms. Lever has taught English as well as Drama for over 30 years and participated in poetry recitation competitions in her childhood in South Africa.
Ms. Wilkerson is an avid poetry reader and writer and is a business reporter for the Journal Record after a 16 year career as a reporter with the News Star.
After a nervous first round the poets settled into their routines and moved the audience with their performances.
“I found myself crying, twice!” Mr. Bushong said.
For the students this is the first ever poetry recitation contest for SHS.
Each student had to choose two poems to memorize and recite from a list of poems provided by the contest sponsors.
The choices can be found at www.poetryoutloud.org.
The champion, Ms. Crowley, chose the free verse poem “Discrimination” by Kenneth Rexroth and an envelope quatrain poem called “Time Does Not Bring Relief: You All Have Lied” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
After the contest was over the students asked if they could “... do this again.”
The students were clearly excited about what they had done.
Dr. Salwierak mentioned that the Freshman English teachers discussed having a competition just for freshmen as part of teaching their poetry section.
“I hope we can have classroom champions and then have each of them compete for the title of Freshman Poetry Champion.” Mr. Bushong said.
Everyone involved voed to make the contest an annual event.
