Nationally recognized high school poets are coming to Woods Hole the week after Christmas to spend their vacation in an intense writing workshop. These students are the twelve regional winners of the National Student Poets Program, chosen from a competition of applicants from across the whole country. A chap book, which will be distributed nationally, will be printed with a photograph and short biography of each author and several pieces of their work.
In the award ceremony in the White House, the honorary chair of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, First Lady Michelle Obama said “This prize is our nation’s highest honor for outstanding high school poets, and it is my pleasure to present this award. Each of these students will serve as an American literary ambassador, sharing their experience, observations, and convictions with audiences across our country and around the world.”
A local Woods Hole family has made their house available for this writing retreat, and as a result, people from Cape Cod will have an opportunity to join in the nation-wide audience when the Woods Hole Public Library hosts a presentation by these young people on Thursday, December 29 at 7:30 PM. The teenagers will read from their work, either some of those poems for which they were awarded this honor, or from their newly created work, as they wish. As library director Margaret McCormick says “I feel very lucky, and honored, that we will be able to have these talented students here. They have been deemed to be the best high school poets in the country.”
Michelle Obama continued to tell these twelve young people “As a National Student Poet, you have the ability to inspire communities and lift up your peers with your powerful words. It gives me great hope to know that our shared future will be shaped by generations of leaders like you.”
For more information, call the Library at 508-548-8961.