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Sheila Sears

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Sheila.Sears@state.co.us  

Poetry Out Loud State Finals Competition February 28

High school students from across Colorado compete in national poetry recitation contest

Denver, CO; February 16, 2011 - Colorado Creative Industries will present the Colorado State Finals for Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest on Monday, February 28 at 6:00 p.m. at the Lakewood Cultural Center, 470 S. Allison Parkway in Lakewood. Twenty-five high school students from across the state, who have already competed and won at the school level, will vie to become the Poetry Out Loud Colorado champion. Contestants will recite works they selected from an anthology of more than 500 classic and contemporary poems. The event is free and open to the public.

Colorado's Poet Laureate, David Mason, will host the evening. The guest judges are Ken Arkind, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Juan J. Morales and Michelle Shedro. 

The state champion will receive an all-expenses-paid trip with a chaperone to the national competition in Washington, DC, April 28 & 29, 2011 with the opportunity to compete for a $20,000 National Finals prize. More information on CCI website. 

The competition is presented in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Participation from rural communities is supported this year by the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation.

Judges Biographies 

David Mason of Colorado Springs as the state's newest, and only seventh, poet laureate. Mason is an accomplished poet and co-director of the creative writing program at Colorado College. His books of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award). The Contemporary Poetry Review and the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum named his verse novel, Ludlow, the best poetry book of 2007. It also won the Colorado Book Award and was featured on the PBS News Hour.

Author of a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry, Mason has also co-edited several textbooks and anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry,

Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Twentieth Century American Poetry, and Twentieth Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry. More information. 

Ken Arkind is a National Poetry Slam Champion and the 2010 Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam Champ. His first collection, I know why Georgia Turner waited by the train tracks is forthcoming by Penmanship Books. Ken is the Executive Director of Denver Minor Disturbance Youth Poetry Project whose goal is to help young folks harness the power of self-expression and self-empowerment through poetry to become healthy and confident adults.

Ruth Ellen Kocher  has published three books, Desdemona's Fire, When the Moon Knows You're Wandering, and One Girl Babylon. Her work has  also been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She'r. She teaches in writing and literature at the University of Colorado - Boulder.

Juan J. Morales received his MFA from the University of New Mexico and is the author of Friday and the Year that Followed (Bedbug Press).  He is the Director of Creative Writing as an Assistant Professor at Colorado State University-Pueblo, where he curates the Southern Colorado Reading Series and the student literary magazine Tempered Steel.  

Michelle Shedro, M.A., is the Education Director of Think 360 Arts, a statewide leader in arts education programming through programs in classrooms and professional development for educators. Michelle's passion for poetry originates from her years in the classroom where she was committed to teaching students the power of the written and spoken word.  In her former role as the National Education Director of America SCORES, she edited Power of Poetry, Stanzas 1 and 2 and coordinated three National Poetry Slams in New York City with students from around the country.