NJ Poetry Out Loud State Finals are Friday!

Ten high school students from around the state will compete on Friday, March 14th in the 9th annual New Jersey Poetry Out Loud State Finals for the opportunity to represent New Jersey in the National Finals in Washington, DC next month. The competition will be held at 10am at the Victoria Theater at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) in Newark.

The event is free and open to the public, and reservations are encouraged. Reserve your tickets now. For those unable to attend in-person, the NJPOL State Finals will be webcast live at jerseyarts.com/pol.

The NJ POL State Finals competition, in which students recite and perform great works of classical and contemporary poetry, is the dramatic culmination of a statewide contest that began in the fall and included a record-breaking 28,618 New Jersey students from 148 high schools, and one homeschool association. Students competed first at the classroom and school levels, and then at the regional level to determine who would move on to the State Finals. Student recitations are evaluated by a panel of judges using standardized, national criteria based on merit and accuracy. The ten regional champions who will compete for the title of NJ Poetry Out Loud State Champion are as follows:

David Anderson – Livingston High School, Livingston
Christelle Marie Chua — Mother Seton Regional High School, Clark
Matthew DeMarco – Dumont High School, Dumont
Gareth Haynes – Doane Academy, Burlington
Noah Jarrett – Northern Valley Regional at Old Tappan, Old Tappen
Ankita Mohapatra – Morris County School of Technology, Denville
Chiamaka Obidigbo –Columbia High School, Maplewood
Ashley Ungvarsky –Cinnaminson High School, Cinnaminson
Natasha Vargas –Lawrence High School, Lawrenceville
Lucy Wang –Holmdel High School, Holmdel

New Jersey Poetry Out Loud is presented by the NJ State Council on the Arts in partnership with Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, and Discover Jersey Arts, an initiative of the Council and the ArtPride New Jersey Foundation. The program is administered in partnership with Bergen County Division of Cultural and Historic Affairs, Rutgers Camden Center for the Arts, Mayo Performing Arts Center, South Orange Performing Arts Center, Two River Theater Company, CavanKerry Press, NJPAC and PCK Media. Support for the NJPOL State Finals is provided by the Horizon Foundation for New Jersey.

NJPOL is part of the national Poetry Out Loud program made possible through the funding and leadership of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Poetry Foundation. The New Jersey State Champion and Runner-up will receive cash awards and stipends provided by the NEA and the Poetry Foundation for the purchase of poetry books by their schools. The New Jersey State Champion will receive an all-expenses paid trip to Washington, DC to compete against 52 State, District of Columbia and U.S. Territories Champions in the National Finals in April for prizes totaling $50,000 in awards and school stipends.

This year, CavanKerry Press has generously donated books of poetry to all participating New Jersey schools and a special award for the teacher of the State Champion – tuition and lodging for the Frost Place Conference for Teachers this June in New Hampshire.

Learn more about New Jersey Poetry Out Loud and watch clips from last year’s state finals at www.jerseyarts.com/pol.