Plainfield Central Junior Wins Award For 'New Perspectives' Poem

Plainfield IL

31 August, 2021

1:20 PM

Description

PLAINFIELD, IL — A junior at Plainfield Central High School is one of 26 students statewide to be honored with a poetry award at the fifth annual Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards, district officials announced Monday. Mackenzie Burgess, who was a sophomore when she entered the contest, won for her poem titled "New Perspectives," a concept she wrote after thinking about how broken crayons can still be used for coloring, according to a news release. Burgess, who said in a statement she writes "all the time," focuses her work on life experience. She said she didn't expect to win at the award ceremony, which she heard about through an English class and a creative writing club at school, according to school officials. "But good things can happen in the end if you're doing the best that you can," Joliet resident Burgess said in a statement. A video of Burgess reading "New Perspectives" can be found here. At the virtual award ceremony, which took place Aug. 21, two winners and an honorable mention were chosen per grade level, spanning kindergarten through 12th grade. The 26 students who were honored were picked from a batch of 365 entries from 75 schools around the state, according to the awards' website. Each student who won was given a compilation book of the winning poems, along with a monetary prize. The annual poetry awards honor Illinois Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, who used to run poetry awards from 1970 to 2000. The Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards started in 2017 to celebrate 100 years since the poet was born. Winners for this year's competition might have just been chosen, but organizers announced they'll be accepting submissions for the sixth annual ceremony starting in late October with a mid-May 2022 deadline. A full list of winners and their poems can be found on the Illinois Humanities website. (For more news and information like this, subscribe to the Plainfield Patch for free. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app; download the free Patch Android app here. Don't forget to like us on Facebook!)