WTHS senior Anya Barrett was named Massachusetts 2020 Poetry Out Loud Champion on March 8th. Congratulations to her! Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry competition that involves many high school students from ages 16 to 18 years old. The competition starts in schools across the country and winners from these school-wide competitions go to compete at the state, then national, level.
Anya says, “I started Poetry Out Loud from a classroom competition Mrs. Holland held during my junior year when I was her student. I thought the competition would be fun”. Anya loved memorizing lines and learning the meanings behind the poems that she chose to recite. Her English teacher, Ms. Holland, facilitates the schoolwide Poetry Out Loud competition at Worcester Tech every year.
In this competition, it’s important for students to put their hearts into the readings, and memorize the poems they’ve chosen. One thing that Anya did before her competition was recite the poem in front of a mirror and kept repeating until she knew she was ready. After that, she would practice performing the poem in front of her loved ones.
She said that this was the most helpful method for her, and that when she went to the actual competitions, she felt prepared because she had already practiced with a crowd. She says, “Once I got to the stage and began, I felt more confident, as if it was just me telling the audience a story. And I believe that the connection I was able to make with these total strangers through words was the most rewarding part of it all”.
Our state champion says that winning the Poetry Out Loud competition was an amazing experience and that she has achieved her dream. Anya says, “I have learned so much. I have learned to love public speaking and I want to do it more in the future.”
After winning the Massachusetts State Competition, Barrett received an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C., where she would have competed in the National Finals on April 27–29, had it not been canceled due to Covid-19.
You can learn more about Massachusetts Poetry Out Loud here: https://www.huntingtontheatre.org/pol/