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Winners of Our Eighth Annual Found Poem Contest
A total of 2,360 teenagers entered our eighth annual Found Poem Contest, more than double the number of entries in 2016. We hope this unexpected volume offers at least a partial excuse for the extra weeks it took us to choose our favorites, which we (finally!) announce below.
To enter, students chose words and phrases from any New York Times article, then created poetry from them. As we note year after year, the work that stands out always does two things well: It shows a real love of, and care with, language, and it honors the Times source material in interesting ways.
All of the poets listed below, in alphabetical order by last name, do both of these things wonderfully. And if you check in with our site from June 13 to July 3 as we publish our top 15 winners, you’ll be able to see that for yourself.
One thing that surprised us: Unlike nearly all the other contests we’ve run since September, this one was not dominated by creative work focused on the topic of “Donald Trump.” We’re not sure why, but we hope you’ll enjoy this list of winning verse on subjects from love and loneliness to Walt Whitman and Beyoncé, trees and $10 bills, the cosmos and “Fearless Girl” instead.
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Winners
Nikolett B, “We Are Not Who We Were”
Sarah Bambilla, “What We Look For”
Jasmine Boerner, “Glasses”
Laurel Booth, “We were”
Amelia D’Avanzo, “Anxious Mind”
Hannah Jeong, “She”
Dante Kirkman, “Southern Dispatches Briefly Noted”
Halle Morrell, “To Whitman”
Ryan Nguyen, “Nothing Less than Heroic”
Alexandria Roehrs, “Eden and the Fishes”
batya s, “the words will find you”
Emma Sheridan, “Before the World Explodes”
Olivia Sun, “Love”
Tan Wang, “Doomed”
Julianne Yu, “Naïve”
Runners-Up
Isaac Bowman, “My Friend, Walt Whitman”
Charlotte Correiro, “Radical Vulnerability”
Hannah Casner, “You, unlikely poet”
Olivia D’Agostini, “A Girl Stands Firm on Wall Street”
AnandaKimm-Drapeau, “$10 Bills”
ElineAkkermans, “The extinction of a landscape”
Alana Francis-Crow, “forceful palms”
Jane McBride, “This is What Love Is”
Mitchell, “White America”
NIckroma, “Investigating an episode”
Armando Nido, “Space Invader”
Emily Palladino, “The Constellations of Life”
Chloe Wiitala, “The Ambience of Oblivion”
April Yoo, “The Philosophy of Man”
Honorable Mentions
Allison Andreasen, “The candor of her suicide was in the breaking point”
AzinAskari, “Wake Up”
Meredith Burke, “Star Immigration”
Ashley & Destiny, “it’s nearly empty”
Maria Flores, “Drowning”
Savannah Fowler, “You’re in a salon full of sky, a soulful mood”
Isaiah Gillis, “Space a world of Mystery and Scientific Theories”
Kaela H, “Everything is Still in Play”
K.L., “D E H U M A N I Z I N G”
KRL, “Today”
Gerald Lorino, “Words bring peace”
Madison Moore, “Steve?”
Kalijah A Rahming, “lemonade: the spiritual movement”
Gabrielle Scott, “Entirely A Poet”
Elijah Tramm, “Haikus for Chicken Delicious”
Tyler Vaughn, “Walt Whitman”
Bethany Wilson, “United States Immigrant History”
Finalists
The students and work listed on this PDF made it to the third round of judging.
Congratulations to all, and don’t forget to participate in our Summer Reading Contest, June 16 to Aug. 25.
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