Amos Koffa was a skinny, bespectacled, middle-school outcast with few friends when the student first wrote a poem. Amos knew of Maya Angelou (after hearing her poem “In and Out of Time” in the 2006 comedy Madea’s Family Reunion, Amos walked around the house murmuring the title like an incantation) but had never written anything that wasn’t part of a school assignment.

Then Amos, who uses the pronouns “they/them/their,” saw a flyer in the library of Science Park High School in Newark, New Jersey: a call for submissions for Talented: 2012 Poetry Collection, published by the America Library of Poetry. “I wrote a poem about being sad,” Amos says. “The title was ‘Sorrow.’ It got put in the book, and I was really happy. I felt like I did something, like my voice mattered.” Amos was fourteen years old.

That year, Amos and other eighth graders watched the school-wide competition for Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation contest created by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Poetry Foundation and administered in partnership with state arts agencies. Amos was a Glee devotee who aspired to be an actor, but this was something new: These were teenagers performing poems by William Shakespeare, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Naomi Shihab Nye. Using their bodies and voices to articulate confusion, passion, and loneliness. Earning applause.

Poetry Out Loud is for high school students only, but the eighth graders did a mock contest in the classroom; teachers and students raved about Amos’s performance. When the yearbook came out, Amos, the gangly teen with a habit of ducking their head at the end of every sentence, was stunned to see their photo with the caption “Most Poetic.”

Breana Sena’s family was serious about the arts. Her father had trained with the Joffrey Ballet before becoming a computer engineer, and both Breana and her older sister, Celeste, took classes at the Ailey School, located at the Joan Weill Center for Dance, in New York City.

Acting was Celeste’s passion, so Breana immersed herself in dance: ballet, flamenco, hip-hop, West African, jazz. Although Breana played Hermia in a middle-school production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Poetry Out Loud came along in high school, Breana ceded the turf to her older sister, who went on to dominate the competition at Ronald E. McNair High School for three years: school-wide champion in 2014, regional competitor in 2015, and state winner in 2016.

Then Celeste graduated.

“I felt like I had to step up, like I had to continue a legacy,” Breana says. She began sifting through the Poetry Out Loud anthology—a 900-poem online digest from which students must make their selections—for a fierce and complicated female voice, for words that might speak to her: a half-Dominican, half-Jamaican high school junior growing up in Jersey City.

Emily Li used to be nonplussed by poetry. “I’d get frustrated when the teacher gave us a poem and nobody knew what the meaning was. I know we did Emily Dickinson—she sticks in my mind because she has the same name as me. We also did ‘Fire and Ice’ by…who was it? Robert Frost. Poetry was such a blur.”

The youngest child of Chinese immigrants, Emily started singing along with YouTube videos when she was eight. At nine, she sang at a high school gala, in a gymnasium packed with three hundred people; after ninth grade, she took a gap year to perform on Chinese Idol, the singing competition program based on the British television series Pop Idol, living in hotels and trying not to breathe too much in Shanghai, where the smell of pollution hung in the air like rancid socks.

Back at the Lawrenceville School, a private New Jersey boarding academy where Poetry Out Loud participation was a requirement for freshmen and sophomores, Emily figured she might as well aim for a good grade. She clicked through the anthology and stumbled on Tony Hoagland’s “Personal.”

“I loved that poem so much,” she says. “It was about how everyone says, ‘Don’t take it personal, calm down; don’t be so emotional.’ And the poem says, ‘You know what? I am going to take it personal.’”

Emily was knocked out at regionals that year for failings that remain obscure. “The judges were writing things down, but we didn’t get to see that,” she says. The following fall, even though Poetry Out Loud wasn’t mandatory for juniors at Lawrenceville, she decided to give the contest another try.

When Poetry Out Loud was launched in 2005, I felt leery. This was the blueprint: High school teachers would help students select, interpret, and memorize classic and contemporary poems, then stage classroom and school-wide contests with volunteer judges—other teachers or administrators, local poets or actors or notable alumni. The school winners would advance to regional contests, then statewide bouts, organized by each state’s arts agency. In late April, one Poetry Out Loud champion from each of the fifty states, plus D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, would gather in an auditorium at George Washington University for a final competition. The grand prize? Twenty thousand dollars.

The whole enterprise seemed so old school—Really? Memorize and regurgitate metered texts by dead white guys?—when my aim, as a visiting writer in New Jersey classrooms, was to wake students to the muscle, range, and freshness of contemporary voices, including their own. I recoiled from the competitive aspect, too. “Wouldn’t that shift focus from the process to the prize?” I thought.

The program’s first year made me a convert. At Trenton High School, I helped an enthusiastic junior articulate the distinct voices—naive daughter and grief-racked mother—in “Ballad of Birmingham,” Dudley Randall’s poem about the 1963 church bombing that killed four African American girls. Over several visits to her school, I watched the kids’ recitations grow a little more robust, their analysis of poetry a bit more probing.

It’s been twelve years. I’ve coached Poetry Out Loud kids in cities and suburbs, vast regional high schools and tiny charter academies. Sure, some comb the anthology for the shortest pieces, then shamble onstage for a gutless rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” But more often, this is what happens: The words get under their skin. A teenager finds something in a five-hundred-year-old sonnet that twangs an experience of rage or heartbreak. They notice ironies and allusions. They breathe where the poet breathed.

I remember one defiant, distracted boy at a suburban high school who latched on to a World War I poem by Rupert Brooke. Suddenly he wanted to win this poetry thing; teachers told me he quit cutting class and started turning in homework. A girl in Camden read Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” and told me that was just how it felt to be female, to be Latina, to smile even when she was shredded inside.

“You may think you’re picking the poems,” I told the kids. “But the poem also chooses you. Your job is to figure out why.”

By sophomore year, Amos and their mother had left Newark, but Amos was still committed to competing in Poetry Out Loud. The performing arts teacher at Amos’s new school, Burlington County Institute of Technology, insisted they practice without a microphone, so they could push their voice to the back rows of the auditorium.

At the regional competition, Amos’s left foot quivered as they stood at the microphone. They got as far as state finals that year, unusual for a tenth grader, and the year after that, when they had to wheedle a chemistry teacher to be their faculty sponsor.

Amos was also finding a tribe: the kids who huddled in the green room before the state contest each March, swapping cell phone numbers and Instagram accounts. “I live in a very provincial area,” Amos says. “At Poetry Out Loud, when I see students from all parts of New Jersey, they’re so accepting and kind.”

The summer after sophomore year, Amos won a scholarship to a summer program; at a meeting of the group’s gay-straight alliance, Amos came out as queer for the first time, then ran to the bathroom and wept. “They were all so proud to be what they were,” Amos says of the members of the alliance. “I was ashamed.”

But by senior year, Amos was older—and bolder, challenging teachers when they elided Bayard Rustin’s homosexuality in discussions of the civil rights movement; performing an original spoken-word piece about kids who are transgender in the school’s talent show. “My acting teacher tells me we should do things that put us out of our comfort zone,” Amos says. “I always get scared before performing, but I don’t let the fear stop me.”

When Breana read “I Sit and Sew,” Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s 1920 poem, written in the voice of a woman conscripted to traditionally feminine tasks while men perform the work of war, she knew she’d found her piece. “I had to put myself in that time period and feel what she felt,” she says. “Hopeless, oppressed, like you can’t do what you most desire to do.”

Breana coded the text: She circled unfamiliar words, highlighted allusions and assonance, penciled in pause marks. She forced herself to memorize the white space as well as the words themselves.

The biggest challenge was to dial back her naturally effusive style. Poetry Out Loud walks a tremulous line between reciting and acting; judges tend not to favor interpretations with extravagant movements, singsong readings, or affected Scottish brogues. “I have to contain myself,” Breana says. “Sometimes I’ll watch myself in the mirror and make sure my gestures look natural instead of forced.”

At the regional contest, held in February 2017 in the auditorium at Rutgers University’s Camden campus, Emily heard the crowd’s chuckles and figured she’d hit home with May Swenson’s “Analysis of Baseball.”

The poem’s content was a stretch, Emily confides. “I sang the national anthem [with the Westminster Neighborhood Children’s Choir] at a Trenton Thunder game when I was, like, seven. I was so bored, but there were times when they run around the bases and get to the end—what’s that called?—when you feel the energy of the people watching.”

Swenson’s piece thrums with rhyme, onomatopoeia, and a staccato beat. Emily’s other choices were subtler: David Kirby’s “Broken Promises,” with its personification and tonal shifts, and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

Emily copied all three into a blank book in her spiky handwriting and worked on channeling each poem’s dominant emotion: jumpy anticipation for “Analysis of Baseball,” regretful anger for “Broken Promises.”

Two days before the state finals, she was still fine-tuning. “‘Broken Promises,’ I really need to tweak a bit. I don’t understand it as much as I should. With ‘Ozymandias,’ I’m still trying to find a way to make it click. ‘Analysis of Baseball,’ I’m going to leave alone. If I do it too much, it will lose the excitement.”

Last year, nearly four hundred thousand kids across the United States took part in Poetry Out Loud. It’s not just for drama geeks or English stars; the program draws jocks and stoners, weirdos and cheerleaders, kids headed for college and kids who seem to be wandering off course.

One day I stood in a circle of teenagers at an alternative school in South Jersey. We’d just been discussing Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice,” and someone had a question. The voice was insistent but polite. “Miss? Hey, Miss. How is this gonna help us in the end?”

Good question. Poetry isn’t a cure, and it isn’t a miracle. It won’t jump your car’s dead battery or fix your leaky roof. It won’t feed your baby or save your dying grandmother. But there are words, phrases, whole poems that—in the grimmest, loneliest, most shattered moments of my life—have offered me a lozenge of light. After my dad died, I sought solace in poetry: Rumi, Lucille Clifton, Dorianne Laux. I wasn’t looking for words to help me feel better; I was looking for words to help me feel—to give name and shape to the gravitational suck of loss, to let me know that I was not alone.

Poetry is a reminder that being human is a crazy weave of pain and beauty and that our job is to live it all, right out to the end of our days.

On the morning of the 2017 New Jersey Poetry Out Loud state finals, Breana woke at 5 AM. She ate a Velveeta snack and drank three cups of tea. She told the taxi driver: “I’m not talking to myself; I’m practicing my poems.” Emily arrived at the competition’s green room, a music studio at the College of New Jersey, with her hardcover journal and uncombed hair. Amos was last, arriving on a school bus, along with their teacher and a gaggle of classmates, earbuds pumping Beyoncé on the way.

The emcee ran the group through vocal warm-ups—“A tutor who tooted a flute / tried to tutor two tots to toot”—and the state’s Poetry Out Loud coordinator reiterated the rules: Don’t change the order of your poems. Don’t put your foot on the microphone stand. “If you get stuck, if you need help, there is one word that will get you out of trouble. What is that word?”

“Line,” the kids chorused weakly.

At Poetry Out Loud competitions, a panel of judges scores each contestant on physical presence, voice and articulation, dramatic appropriateness, evidence of understanding, and overall performance. Another judge listens for accuracy alone.

Sometimes a careless rendition—soulful and true but with a dropped stanza or a few small mistakes—can sink a score. On the other hand, a reading can be word-perfect but heartless. Some kids use the same clichéd repertoire of gestures—a plaintive wave, a fist hammering the heart—for all three poems. Others can’t contain a nervous tic. Some speak too fast or pause too long.

But each year there is at least one performance that makes me forget myself and the scoring rubric and the scratchy seat under me. I wait for it: the poem that will leave me wakeful, trembling, changed.

That morning, Emily reveled in the crisp diction of “Analysis of Baseball.” Amos bent their voice like a blues guitar, delivering the torrent of Jack Collom’s “Ecology.” Breana turned “I Sit and Sew” into an astringent prayer, her eyes wet with the rage of a woman consigned to stitch “the little, useless seam.”

Round one. Round two. The judges marked their tally sheets. Then it was Amos again—their third poem, their senior year, their final shot at Poetry Out Loud—with James L. Dickey’s “The Hospital Window,” a piece they’d attempted and abandoned the year before. Amos gestured to an imagined sixth-floor window, face tipped toward the sky. “My father is there, / In the shape of his death still living.” My skin prickled, my eyes stung. Yes. My father, too, is gone, and not-gone, a presence and a wound. Amos stepped back from the microphone, eyes cast down.

Ten minutes crawled by while a tabulator added the scores. The state champion would receive an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for the national round of competition and the chance to perform poems just a few Metro stops from a president who had attempted to ax the NEA. I hoped some members of Congress might mosey over to George Washington University for the final rounds.

Finally, it was time. “The New Jersey Poetry Out Loud Champion for 2017…Amos Koffa!” Amos abruptly tumbled backward from the risers; had they fainted? But no, there Amos was, vertical again, eyes huge and narrow shoulders shaking. Breana was declared the day’s runner-up and met that news with a stiff smile; later she wondered whether she should have begun with her strongest piece, “I Sit and Sew.” Emily remained characteristically upbeat: “Amos one hundred million percent deserved that!”

Amos couldn’t linger in the afterglow. There was a fusillade of photos, and a canvas tote of swag, and then the teacher was herding Amos and their classmates to the bus. In the lobby, kids waved cell phones and reached out for hugs.

In less than six weeks, Amos would board a train, along with their high school drama teacher, for a first trip to Washington, D.C. They would visit the Mall that isn’t really a mall—more like a giant plaza dotted with monuments. They would tour the National Museum of African American History and Culture and feel shocked by how much was absent from the high school curriculum. At the national competition, they would jump when “Amos Koffa” was called as one of three semifinalists from the eastern region. They would feel proud, even when they didn’t win.

Poems live. They voice something irrepressible in us. But on that brisk spring afternoon in New Jersey, Amos looked stunned at what poetry had wrought, at the classmates swanning around them—a child of Liberian ancestry raised by a single mother, a gender-queer gadfly, an aspiring social worker and spoken-word artist, head visible above the rest as they straggled across the parking lot.

The 2018 National Finals will be held April 23 to 25 at George Washington University. For more information, visit www.poetryoutloud.org [3].

Anndee Hochman is a journalist, essayist, and teaching artist. Her column, “The Parent Trip,” appears weekly in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and her work has also been published in O, the Oprah Magazine, Redbook, Cooking Light, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. She is the author of Anatomies: A Novella and Stories (Picador, 2000) and Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community, and Home (Eighth Mountain Press, 1994).