Events Upcoming
New Members
“Poetry is essential, as needful to us as water.” Angela Jackson
Award-winning teenagers from around Illinois are set to compete in Springfield for a slot in the 2025 Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest in Washington, D.C., in early May. The state event is free, accessible, and open to the public. It is set to begin at 10:00 A.M. on Monday, March 17, 2024, in the LRS Theatre of the Hoogland Center for the Arts at 420 South Sixth Street in downtown Springfield. A special guest will be Angela Jackson, Illinois’s poet laureate, who will recite during the competition.
The Springfield Area Arts Council will host fourteen high school students who were winners and runners-up in competitions held in February in seven regions spanning Illinois. Starting in their own classrooms, these students study, memorize, and recite renowned classic and contemporary poetry at each level of competition. A panel of poets, teachers, and performers judges each recitation. The state champion will receive a trip to the nation’s capital to join a field of fifty-four students vying for the top prize of $20,000.
The Springfield Area Arts Council coordinates this annual contest in partnership with the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Poetry Out Loud is backed by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Now in its twentieth year, the contest is designed to encourage interest in poetry at the high school level. In Illinois this season, over 7,800 students and 200 teachers from 48 Illinois public and private high schools participated.
More information is available at www.poetryoutloud.org.
