The Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Out Loud: National Recitation Contest, established in 2005, is a program designed to encourage high school students to explore aspects of spoken word, theater, and slam poetry in their English classes through memorizing and reciting great poems.

Maya Angelou (1928- ) has achieved renown in many arenas of the arts as a civil rights activist, essayist, editor, playwright, and poet. Her poems are among the most celebrated of contemporary American poetry, frequently praising the grace and beauty of black women.

W.H. Auden (1907-1973) was born in Birmingham, England.He immigrated to the United States just before the outbreak of World War II where his book The Age of Anxiety was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. “The Unknown Citizen”, published in 1939, is a satirical comment on the rise of standardization in society at the expense of individualism. It is a fictional epigraph of a man described entirely in the external terms of corporate officials such as the Bureau of Statistics and the report of his Union at Fudge Motors, Inc.

Rhina P. Espaillat (1932- ) was born in the Dominican Republic. Her father’s opposition to the dictatorship of Rafael Trujilio led to her family’s exile to the United States, where they settled in New York. She began writing poetry in Spanish and English as a young child, and has published in both languages. Her poem “Bilingual/Bilingüe” uses inserted Spanish translations of English words to express her evolving experience in reconciling her two languages.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was frequently lauded by contemporary critics as the greatest poet writing in the Spanish language during his lifetime. It is perhaps the difficulty of translating Neruda’s works or his staunch support of communism that brought the observation that “no writer of world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda,” from New York Times Book Review critic Selden Rodman. “La Poesia” describes the profoundly moving force of poetry on its narrator’s life.

Alberto Ríos (1952- ) was born in the city of Nogales, Arizona to a British mother and a Mexican father. His experience of living between two cultures is evident in his relationship with his three languages: Spanish, English, and a combination of the two. “The Pomegranate and the Big Crowd” contains evidence of this linguistic and cultural richness in its movingly descriptive imagery and magical insight into a young girl’s first kiss.

In his book Theme and Variations, the great American violinist and ombudsman for music of all kinds Yehudi Menuhin (1911-1999) wrote, “Music can never be an abstraction, however thoughtful and objectless – for its object is the living man in time – nor can it be accidental, however improvised…because improvisation is not the expression of accident but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams, and wisdom of our very soul.”