Courtney Stewart Wins MA 2016 Poetry Out Loud Champion for Third Time

Springfield Central High School senior Courtney Stewart was named Massachusetts's 2016 Poetry Out Loud Champion Sunday at Boston's Old South Meeting House. He bested 24 other finalists to earn the top honor. Stewart is the first contestant in Massachusetts to win the title three times. First runner-up was Meloee Nazaire, a senior from Revere High School, and second runner-up was Ben Cohen, a sophomore from Needham High School. This is Ben's second year placing in the top three in Massachusetts.

Stewart receives an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, DC where he will compete in Poetry Out Loud's National Finals May 2 - 4. The Huntington Theatre Company has facilitated the competition locally with support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for 11 years, since the program began. The program is facilitated nationally by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.

The top six finalists also included Hannah Moran, a senior from Algonquin Regional High School, Patrick Kitchen, a senior from Dartmouth High School, and Caroline Rice, a senior from the International School of Boston.

More than 21,000 students from a record 87 schools across the Commonwealth recently participated in classroom and school-wide competitions of the national recitation competition. Poetry Out Loud celebrates the power of the spoken word and a mastery of public speaking skills while cultivating self-confidence and an appreciation of students' literary heritage as they take poetry from the page to the stage. Since its inception 11 years ago, the competition has inspired hundreds of thousands of high school students to discover and appreciate both classic and contemporary poetry.

Seventy-six school winners competed March 5 and 6 at regional semi-final competitions in Boston, Framingham, Springfield, and on Cape Cod. Massachusetts ranked fourth in the nation for both number of students participating and for number of teachers participating. National rankings include all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.

Huntington Theatre Company Manager of Education Operations Meg O'Brien reflects on the state competitions, "Our 24 finalists were breathtaking in their recitations, infusing Boston's Old South Meeting House with powerful verse, prose, celebration, spirit, and joy. Poetry Out Loud is one of the best programs available to our high school students. We're already looking forward to next year's program, and are quite eager to get to Washington, DC this spring for the National Competition! The National Endowment for the Arts announced last week that in 11 years, Poetry Out Loud has reached 3 million students, 10,000 schools, and 45,000 teachers. Those numbers tell the story of a program that is irresistible to all who are touched by it."

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