STATEWIDE – The Fourth Annual Poetry Out Loud competition will be held live at the NJN Public Television Studio in Trenton on Thursday, March 19 at 10:00 am and will be streamed live on the web at NJN . The competition will also be aired on NJN2 for one week starting April 6, 2009.

Poetry Out Loud uses a pyramid structure where students recite and perform poetry first at the classroom level, and winners advance to school-wide competitions, then to state-capital competitions, and ultimately to the National Finals. This year more than 8,600 New Jersey students participated in the program from 45 different high schools and one home school association.  The NJ state winner and runner-up will compete at the National Finals in Washington DC and receive cash awards and stipends for the purchase of poetry books for their schools provided by the national program founders, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.

NJN will open the doors of its Trenton studios to New Jersey’s six high school student finalists from Linwood, Willingboro, Piscataway, Ewing and Newark for the statewide competition.  The guests will include NJ Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells, an audience of hundreds of students, as well as poets and other special guests, and program partners including the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.  NJN Public Television was the first television station to host and produce a Poetry Out Loud event.

This New Jersey program, which has tripled in size since it began, was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Additional funding was provided by The Poetry Foundation, the Karma Foundation and is co-sponsored with Playwrights Theatre of NJ and NJN.

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