McPherson & James at the 2014 Dodge Poetry Festival
Alyssa McPherson ’13 and Flannery James ’14 performed their poetry at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on October 24, 2014. The reading of NJCTE and National Student Poets took place in NJPAC’s Victoria Theater. Alyssa and Flannery were invited to read because they were awarded Gold Medals in Poetry by the New Jersey Council of Teachers of English in 2012 (Flannery) and 2013 (Alyssa and Flannery) and went on to receive Governor’s Awards in Arts Education at an April 2013 ceremony at the War Memorial Theater in Trenton. The Dodge Poetry Festival, where Flannery also read in 2012, is a 4-day biennial event in which audiences attend readings and discussions offered by dozens of internationally acclaimed poets. A Star-Ledger article about the festival, which you can find here, includes quotes from Alyssa and Flannery.
Alyssa is a sophomore at Brown University and Flannery is a freshman at Columbia University. If you would like to read their work and/or see a video excerpt from the performance, you can find them on NA’s Writing, Art & Music forum, known as WAM! Congratulations, poets!
McPherson reading her poetry in NJPAC’s Victoria Theater.