First lady Jill Biden hosted the class of 2022 National Student Poets program at the White House on Tuesday.
The five students who received the highest honor for youth poets were invited to participate in a poetry reading facilitated by the Kentucky writer and the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States Ada Limon.
Biden, who has served as an educator for more than 30 years, spoke about the importance of the written word.
“In the words of others I found the contours of my joy. I found a place to lay down my fears. I found a compass that would lead me through the darkest of woods,” Biden said at the event on Tuesday.
Each one of the national student poets serves as ambassadors for the year and creates a community service project that will impact people in their region.
The tenth-anniversary honorees shared a glimpse of their work in front of an audience filled with past program participants.
“Her smile is weathered. Our pasts trodden. A mother once young sees herself in the shattered mirror,” Emily Igwike, a student from Wisconsin said.
Ada Limon, the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, facilitated the event and said: “We aren’t just celebrating poetry, but we are celebrating the future.”
Limon said that, much like these students, she too started writing at a very young age.
“You know I started dabbling in poetry at a very young age ... I’d say six or seven. I remember writing songs at age 10 ... I think I was writing what I knew as poems at 15,” she continued.
Limon said one of the biggest misconceptions about poetry is that it has to become someone’s only focus in life.
“Poetry can be written in between different day jobs. It can be written while you’re taking a course in something else and I think it’s important to remember that poetry is a part of life," she said. "It’s not that you have to throw all of your other desires away to keep writing. It’s just that you have to keep writing.”
Limon is scheduled to give her inaugural reading as the 24th Poet Laureate on Thursday at the Library of Congress which will be streamed on YouTube in the Library of Congress' event videos collection.
The National Student Poets Program is an initiative that started during the Obama-Biden administration, with direction from former First Lady Michelle Obama in 2012. It’s the nation's highest honor for youth poets from grades 10 through 12 who present original work, according to a news release.