Senior Thea Gonzales won the school-wide Poetry Out Loud competition Tuesday, Feb. 9. Junior Alana Knobel was runner-up.

Gonzales and Knobel will advance to next round of competitions which will take place Monday, Feb. 22 at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago.

For Gonzales, it was a good experience.

“It’s really cool and I’ve been working on Poetry Out Loud for four years now, this is my fourth year in the program and it was just, I think, unconsciously, I started to grow in poetry. I started to feel like not an obligatory thing, and more of a thing that I started to enjoy and grow into. So it’s just really cool,” Gonzales said.

She performed the poems “Becoming a Redwood” by Dana Gioia and “Blind Curse” by Simon J. Ortiz.

Gonzales said she was very nervous last night, but had some luck while reciting.

“Oh, I was so nervous,” Gonzales said. “Memorizing my second poem was like, ‘Do I know this? Do I not?’ because I have experienced when you don’t really know a poem and you go up to perform it, but I don’t even know if it was adrenaline or just luck, like I bought on of the things at the French mardi gras thing, the cookies. I got the luck bead because I knew I needed some extra luck that day and I guessed that worked, so one dollar is a small price to pay for luck.”