Ardmore Library Hosts Poetry Reading, Contest

Walking through the halls of the Lower Merion Township Building on Sunday, one would have overheard something a little different from the usual discourse about building permits and taxes: poetry.

The award ceremony for Ardmore Library’s Sixth Annual Charlotte Miller Simon Poetry Contest brought almost 100 guests to the Township Building on Sunday afternoon, where poets in the children, teen and adult poetry categories recited their winning poems, head librarian Jane Quin said.

The library received 222 entries for this year’s contest. Judges—University of Pennsylvania senior lecturer Ronit Engel, founder and program director of We The Poets Cathleen Cohen, and assistant professor of English at St. Joe’s Peter Norberg—selected first, second and third place poems in the children, teen and adult divisions, respectively.

The contest is held in honor of Charlotte Miller Simon, a library patron who passed away in 2004.

“She was a teacher, a literature professor at Temple, a founding member of the Main Line Poetry Center, and a patron of Ardmore Library,” Quin said. “Her three sons lived in Ardmore as children, and for over 12 years she brought them to the Ardmore Library."

When Simon passed away in 2004, her son Jonathan and his wife Christina set up an endowment for a poetry contest to be held at Ardmore Library in her honor. Jonathan and Christina attend the contest ceremony each year, Quin said.

The winning poems in each category were as follows:

Children:

"The Fire In Israel" by Lindsey Schweitzer

"I Love My Grandparents" by Jessica Zhang

"Any Thing But This" by Darius Volertas

Teen:

"The Swing and the Song" by Talia Baurer

"Go Inside Yourself" by Daniel Olivieri

"Nature Poem" by Connie Li

Adult:

"Autumn Lilies" by Alison Hicks

"Poems Everywhere" by Kerri D. Schuster

"Heinrich, Our Butcher, In Time of War" by Virginia M. Fry