Maine East student advances to state poetry competition
Maine East High School senior Dana Castillo is on a roll, having won first place in the Chicagoland regional "Poetry Out Loud" competition Tuesday, Feb. 16, just days after she earned first place for the second consecutive year in Maine East's competition. Dana will now compete in the state contest on March 18 for a chance to advance to the nationals next spring.
Maine East English Department Chairman Helen Gallagher said students eagerly compete in "Poetry Out Loud," which involves selecting poems from an online anthology, with hundreds of possibilities, memorizing at least one poem from the anthology and preparing to deliver it publicly. The competition also involves reciting the poem for their class and competing to be the classroom winner.
This year more than half of all East students received this assignment as a requirement in their English classes. As a result, 58 classroom winners were invited to compete in the school contest Thursday, Feb. 11. English teacher David Hessert served as master of ceremonies, while English teacher Cathy Creagh and Learning Resource Center director Merrilee Anderson worked hard as judges to score students in seven categories: physical presence, voice and articulation, appropriateness of dramatization, level of difficulty, evidence of understanding, overall performance and accuracy.
In addition to Castillo taking first place in the Maine East competition, Paulina Nowak placed second, and third place went to Dominika Koziol. Other finalists included Karol Grzebien, Patrice Campbell, Christina Giannokopoulos, Amalia Kanelos and Raja Umair-Amjad.
Classroom winners, in addition to the finalists, were: Fazil Ansari, Kristen Beierwaltes, Julia Besch, Keandra Broaster, Patrice Carpenter, M.J. Cunanan, Ashley Daul, Jasmine DeDios, Afia Ekra, Jessica Gammell, Anna Garcia, Dylan Guzman, Katie Garvey, Laksmi Gil, Ahmad Hamdan, Adam Herlo, Nicole Hoffman, Cyril Jackson, Angela Jones, Justyna Kaczmarzyk, Shirley Kakkanad, Keriakos Kappos, Mohammed Khalil, Eliza Kolakowski, Angelica Lazarz, Jeffrey Levinson, Gisel Martinez, Daniel Mercado, Megan Mistretta, Sunny Nair, Mahek Parikh, Sona Parmar, Mychael Patytskyy, Abdullah Qaisar, Kayla Ramsay, Cyrano Roche, Brandon Roman, Angel Salgado, Jong Shin, Sarah Shulga, Adrian Skorka, Tina Spanos, Justin Stancy, Samantha Stankowicz, Amanda Steckly, Rafaela Stoyanova, Zoriana Telwak, Jason Thomas, Kimberly Thompson, Deanna Vasilopoulos, Louie Velazquez and Ebbony Wilson.
The Illinois Arts Council oversees the state competition in Poetry Out Loud, a national program created five years ago by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. More than 300,000 students competed last year; this year's national finals will take place in Washington, D.C., on April 27.
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