Hundreds of kindergarten through 12th grade students from across the state visited Mississippi State University’s campus on Friday for the inaugural Mississippi Young Writers Poetry Festival.
The festival was created by Catherine Pierce, professor of English and co-director of creative writing, who is also the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
“The festival started in the fall with a state-wide poetry writing initiative,” Pierce said. “Last summer I received a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, a Poet Laureate Fellowship, to do a civic project. The civic project that I proposed was a fall poetry writing initiative for students in grades K-12.”
Students in these grades throughout the state were sent a poetry prompt asking them to write a poem about their hometown.
The individual schools chose three winners from each grade, and sent them on to the state-wide contest.
The school-wide winners were the ones invited to Friday’s festival.
“The idea behind that was just to try to give students an opportunity to explore poetry in a way that was fun and meaningful for them and a way that they could feel personally connected to,” Pierce said. “The festival is the culmination of that project.”
The day-long celebration featured interactive poetry sessions for different grade levels, each led by a different Mississippi poet; an awards ceremony and reading by the winners; and a keynote address by Isabella Ramirez, who is the 2022 Southern Regional Youth Poet Laureate.
“It’s incredibly exciting and it feels like such a huge honor to get to work with all of these students in this way,” Pierce said. “One of my favorite parts of this whole project has been, after all of our school-wide winners’ poems came in, we compiled those into an anthology, and the Mississippi Center for the Book helped us get those printed. So, every school-wide winner is going to receive a copy of this anthology that has their poem in it. They are all going to be published authors.”
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