March 17, 2025 Update: A Rockford student will compete in the national portion of a spoken word competition. Mikiah Gerrity is a junior at Jefferson High School. She won the state portion of the Poetry Out Loud Competition. This is the first time someone from the city has advanced to the national stage. Gerrity will compete in the final event from May 5-7 in Washington D.C.
Previous reporting:
Two Rockford high school students are headed to the state portion of a national poetry competition.
Poetry Out Loud is a national competition open to high school students. It started two decades ago. The first competition starts out regionally. Next come state competitions and finally the national one.
Students memorize and perform poems written by other authors. Mikiah Gerrity is a junior at Jefferson High School in Rockford. One of the poems the seventeen-year-old will recite is “The Definition of Love” by Andrew Marvell.
Gerrity is on the speech team and does theater. She said poetry is beautiful.
“I see a lot of poems," she said, "and they just like, it's amazing how people can put words together."
Grant Smith is a senior at Jefferson. He is also competing in the state portion. He said he barely knew anything about poetry.
“But the more I got into it and kind of started working with MacArthur," he said, "I was like, wait, poetry is actually awesome. I love the way it like, the freedom it has, breaking the rules of normal English.”
Smith's referring to Douglas McArthur, an English teacher at the school. McArthur says there is nothing higher than poetry when it comes to language.
“And I think spending a little bit of time with poetry can be beneficial for anybody,” he said. “Both the performance aspect as well as the analysis aspect and just opening up to cultures and ideas that maybe they don't normally see.”
McArthur says Jefferson is the only school in the Rockford area that participates in Poetry Out Loud. He expresses that he would like to see this change.
“Poetry Out Loud is unique in that it's sort of designed to work with schools," he said. "It has lesson plans that are already created. It has guidance for educators to teach it in the classroom. And so, it makes it a really easy step to bring it into schools. And so, yeah, I want everybody to be doing it.”
Jordan DeWilde of the Rockford Area Arts Council says he also wants the program to grow.
“There’s a really rich poetry community in Rockford," DeWilde said. "We have, you know, poetry slams and spoken word competitions happening at Inscape Collective, at Katie's Cup. There are, you know, there are prolific spoken word artists like Christopher Sims, like Dylan Garcia, we have a poet laureate program.”
The two students say they will spend time memorizing and practicing their poems for the next step of the competition. They are asking their peers to get involved and share creativity, even if it isn’t for Poetry Out Loud.
“Read books, read poetry, do artistic things,” Garrity said. “Because the creative side of people is always, it's always so beautiful to see someone being creative, because not everyone gets to see inside that mind of yours.”
The Illinois competition takes place on March 17 in Springfield. The national event takes place May 5 through 7 in Washington, D.C.
