Poetry Out Loud

 

National Recitation Contest

The library is sponsoring homeschoolers in the Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest . On Friday, February 15 at 10 am at the Main Library, one student will be chosen to represent Cabell County Public Library in the state competition in Charleston on Saturday, March l5.

 

The winner in Charleston will be sent to the national finals in Washington D.C. on April 29.  The national contest is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the West Virginia Division of Culture and History.

 

The Poetry Out Loud Contest encourages the nation's youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and performance, which help students master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about our literary heritage. Each homeschooler in the library's program chose and memorized  three poems from a specific poetry bank.  They have come to the library every week since October to practice performing their poems. 

 

The judges at the library's poetry competition on Friday, February 15th will be:

 

Laura Treacy Bentley, a  poet, fiction writer, and literary critic.  Ms. Bentley has been a teacher of the gifted in West Virginia and also taught in Kentucky, and an adjunct profesor at Marshall University.  In 1994 she received a Fellowship Award for Literature from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts.  Her poetry has been published widely in the United and Ireland.  Ms. Bentley's  love of the people and landscapes of West Virginia, western Maryland, and Ireland is evident in her new book of poems "Lake Effect."

 

Beverly Delidow,  Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Microbiology in the School of Medicine at Marshall.  Professor Delidow has taught a variety of science courses for medical and graduate students and also teaches communication skills for first year graduate students.  Creative writing (poetry, long fiction and short fiction) has been her life-long avocation.  Professor Delidow is a member of two local writing groups, the Guyandotte Poetry Society and BlackDog Fiction Writers.

 

Edwina Pendarvis, a retired professor of English at Marshall.  Professor Pendarvis' poems and essays appear in such journals as Antietam Review, Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Louisville Review, Now & Then, and Wind Magazine and in anthologies, including Wild, Sweet Notes:  Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry.  Her collection of memoirs about an eastern Kentucky family, "Raft Tide and Railroad: How We Lived and Died," is forthcoming from Blair Mountain Press, Summer, 2008.