After winning Trinity Hall’s Poetry Out Loud for her second time on February 11, Joy Ogunsakin ‘26 attended the Poetry Out Loud Regional Competition, where she was victorious!
Poetry Out Loud New Jersey is an arts education program that allows high school students across the state to recite various pieces of poetry. Trinity Hall students participated in the 2026 program and several rounds were held before choosing this year’s school contestants. Senior Joy Ogunsakin was chosen to represent Trinity Hall at the regional competition.
In order to prepare, she went through a process of selecting her poems. This process included using a feature on the Poetry Out Loud website that would randomly generate a poem. Ogunsakin used this repeatedly until she found her three poems that she recited. She stated, “Each poem has a small preview of the first few lines and if it did not click for me, then I did not pick it. I knew that I wanted to select three different poems to really show a range. One had to be about the Harlem Renaissance and that was the first one I found and the other two were extremely contrasting as one was really loud and passionate while the other was more solemn and accepting.”
This event was a very special and unforgettable experience for contestants. Ogunsakin described the day by sharing, “I really loved it because this year they did something different where after the second round they did not eliminate anyone. When I attended my sophomore year, they eliminated a good amount of people for the third round to be the final five contestants.” Prior to the day, she was not aware that they had changed this and so it affected the way she ordered her poems. Ogunsakin decided to start off with a very powerful poem to strategize. However, since they did not do eliminations this year, she stated, “it was a lot less nerve-wracking to mess up because everyone still had a chance round after round and it made the day a lot more friendly!”
Ogunsakin was one of two contestants at the regional competition to be chosen to represent at the state competition. When asked about her win, she shared, “I will be honest that I felt pretty confident throughout the competition and had high hopes of winning but there were a lot of really great contestants there as well.” A competition of this magnitude can be extremely daunting, but Ogunsakin handled it with grace and truly had fun sharing her love for poetry and performance. She stated, “I wasn’t nervous until the moment I was on the stage and backstage I would sometimes scare myself that I had forgotten the words but once I just went on stage, it all came back. I really trusted myself and had the mindset that I was going to come out winning so that my nerves wouldn’t take over me.”
This annual program is a special way to celebrate and appreciate the arts and poetry. Joy moved onto the state competition at the Count Basie Theater on March 3 and left victorious once again. Named the state champion for New Jersey’s Poetry Out Loud competition, Joy will compete at the national level in Washington, D.C. at the end of April, representing New Jersey and Trinity Hall. The Trinity Hall community is looking forward to Ogunsakin’s performance at the national competition and wishes her good luck!