At the 44th Annual Parkmont Poetry Festival, Kim Schraf, who has led the festival for 19 years, told us the Festival’s story. “We are so fortunate to live in a vibrant poetry village here in the DMV,” she said, “and it’s into just such a village that the Parkmont Poetry Festival was born.” The idea took shape in 1982, “a pebble that two visionary Parkmonters dropped into the village pond.” Those visionaries were Ron McClain, our head of school, and Judy Lentz, an indefatigable Parkmont parent, staff member, and board leader. The idea was to bring together students from public and private schools all over the city to “have a conversation through the medium of poetry.”
The celebrated Maryland poet Lucille Clifton served as the judge of the first Parkmont Poetry Festival, an auspicious beginning for sure! Since then, the festival has grown by connecting with one village after another: the village of professional poets who volunteer their time as judges, and, in the case of poet and former Parkmont teacher Sharan Strange, lovingly emceeing the event for many years; the English teachers who connect their students to us; patrons Jacqui Michel, David Weisman, Anne Woodworth, and the other supporters whose generosity sustains the festival, and our neighbors at Zion Baptist Church, who welcomed the festival when it outgrew the Parkmont Commons.
Sean Felix and Tatiana Figueroa Ramirez, members of the DMV’s vibrant poetry village, served as our preliminary judges this year, reading hundreds of submissions to select 40 middle school poems and 40 high school poems as semifinalists. Poet Alexa Patrick served as finalist judge, charged with what she called the “near-impossible task” of choosing only 20 poems from each group to be published in the Festival Booklet.
At the Festival reading, Alexa told the student poets that the tenderness and truth-telling in their work had moved her. She welcomed them into “a long legacy of word workers, world builders, and freedom makers.” Whether they go on to write hundreds more poems or none at all, she urged the students to hold on to their instinct “to create something that makes it easier to be human.”
