Today’s Westchester Poetry Festival shares spoken word at Masters

Tyler Jarecki, Sports Editor

Saturday, April 12, The Masters School, in partnership with The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, will be hosting The Westchester Poetry Festival for the fourth year in a row.  Not only will there be several published poets attending the event, but there will also be Masters students reading their own poems as well as poems written by others.

This year the keynote speaker will be Ann Lauterbach. A National Book Award nominee, Lauterbach has a M.A. in English literature and was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 1995.  Her poetry collection Or to Begin Again (Penguin, 2009) was nominated for the National Book Award.  Lauterbach also taught at Brooklyn College, Columbia University, Princeton University, Bard College, the City College of New York, and the Yale Graduate School of the Arts.  Lauterbach is currently co-chair of writing at the Milton Avery School of Arts.

Acclaimed poets joining Lauterbach are Cahal Dallat, Cornelius Eady, Dorothea Lasky, Margo Stever, Kevin Varrone, and Monica Youn, along with a dozen Masters student poets.

 

Rachel Saunders, Sherman Goldblum, Amalia Mayorga, Gabriella Davies, Emmeline Sudock, Casey Chon, Sam Miller, Jonathan Eatroff, Gio Kim, Alexander Daibes, Maya Bater, and Kristina Miebach will all be reciting poems at the festival.  Sophomore Emmeline Sudock said, “The poem I am reading is about my childhood and my relationship with my brother. I picked it because I felt it represents who I am, not only as a person, but also as a writer.”

Junior Amalia Mayorga said, “My poem is about trying to find out where I belong in a society that doesn’t seem to encourage the existence of people like myself. I picked it because as a junior going through the college process I’m finding that its making me feel more and more like a failure and less encouraging, so I wrote something to get through it.  I listed out all my traits and characteristics and then asked the question of where would someone like me belong? It made me find out a lot of things in myself that I was good at and made me realize that just because I’m not the ideal college applicant, doesn’t mean I’m not worthy.”

Poetry is a way of expressing a range of emotions, if you would like to experience this please join the poetry festival at Masters this Saturday at 1 p.m

The festival is open to the public; admission and parking are free of charge.photo-11