Mount Sophia’s Olivia Stevens 2025 Poetry Out Loud champ

Olivia Stevens, a junior at Mount Sophia Academy in Brookside, is the 2025 Delaware Poetry Out Loud champion.

Stevens is an aspiring writer and vocalist who has written and published a novel entitled “The Locket Mystery” and is currently working on her second.

She enjoys writing free verse poetry and short stories, which have won several awards and have been included in national and regional literary journals.

As an active vocalist, she has participated in prestigious summer vocal academies, including the Boston University Tanglewood Institute.

Apart from storytelling, Olivia is the captain of a firstrobotics team that represented Delaware at the 2019 and 2021 World Competitions.

At the competition Thursday night, held at the Smyrna Opera House, Stevens recited: “Sanctuary” by Jean Valentine, “Crossing the Bar” by Lord Alfred Tennyson, and “Architect’s Watercolor” by Arthur Sze.

Stevens’ victory comes following two straight, back-to-back wins by Maiss Hussein of Hodgson Vo-Tech, who graduated last summer.

RELATED: Get to know Delaware’s 2x poetry queen, Maiss Hussein

Stevens won the competition against 11 other finalists.

About Poetry Out Loud

Poetry Out Loud was created in 2004 and launched in 2005 by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts 

It’s a national poetry recitation program for high school students that has reached more than 4.4 million students and 81,000 teachers from 20,000 schools across the nation.

Contestants choose works from an anthology of more than 1,200 poems, and are judged on their physical presence, eye contact and body language, pace, rhythm, punctuation, dramatic appropriateness, articulation and evidence of understanding.

In addition to $50,000 in prizes and stipends awarded annually to competitors and their home communities, including a $20,000 prize for the national champion, Poetry Out Loud provides free poetry education resources nationally, including lesson plans and other educational materials for teachers and organizers, tips on reciting, and the online anthology of classic and contemporary poems.

The 2025 Poetry Out Loud National Finals will take place May 5-7, 2025, in Washington, D.C.