Winning selections for 10th annual poetry contest announced Thursday
VIA Metropolitan Transit recognized the winners of its tenth annual “Poetry on the Move” contest Thursday, March 28, 2019. The popular poetry competition is held each year in observance of National Poetry Month. Winning entries have been brought to life with illustrations provided by students from five area art programs, and they will be featured inside the VIA fleet throughout the month of April.
“VIA has been providing our customers with moving works of art for ten years now, through Poetry on the Move,” VIA President and CEO Jeffrey C. Arndt said. “This contest challenges poets and artists to find connections throughout the community, incorporating the literary and metrical aspects of poetry with the visual arts to inspire creativity and share experiences with VIA’s customers. The results are astounding, and quite moving, in every meaning of the word.”
Poetry on the Move is open to anyone living in Central and South Texas who is at least 18 years old. Some of the notable winners of the contest include San Antonio Poet Laureate for 2016-2018, Jenny Browne, who was also was the Texas Poet Laureate for 2017; Texas Poet Laureate for 2010 Karla K. Morton; and award-winning children’s book author Diane Gonzales Bertrand.
Past judges have also included Texas Poet Laureate for 2013, Rosemary Catacalos; Texas Poet Laureate for 2018, Carol Coffee Reposa; and San Antonio Poet Laureate for 2018-2020, Dr. Octavio Quintanilla.
The winning selections for VIA’s Poetry on the Move for 2019 are:
• Lahab Assef Al-Jundi – “Did I imagine”
• Sarah Colby – “Stoneware For Deployment”
• Mollie Gates – “The Unknown Gardener”
• Geraldine Guadagno – “Texas Weather”
• Michael Gullickson – “The Perfectly Magical One Syllable Word”
• Kimberley Jones – “Afterglow”
• Catherine Lee – “If Walls Could Talk”
• Don Mathis – “Granddaddy’s Knife”
• Linda Simone – “Silverfish”
• Carol Siskovic – “Destination Deadline”
To enhance the program further, VIA partners with the San Antonio Public Library and receives 10 youth selections through their Young Pegasus program. These poems are listed below.
• Christian Orion Banda – “The Life of a Pencil”
• Silas Loring Bartlett – “Poem Assignment: A Limerick”
• Sebastian Bishop – “My dog Zoe”
• Seth Borslien – “Age”
• Bernabe Esquivel – “Halloween”
• Kaitlyn Min-Xia Fleming – “Prevention”
• Reuben Frey – “Diana’s Fox”
• Jackie Pavlovsky – “Broken”
• Nivedita Somasundaram – “Rain”
• Antonio “Max” Trivizo – “I pad”
A total of 20 poems were sent to the following local arts programs, where they were illustrated for VIA bus interior cards: North East School of the Arts, the Edgewood Fine Arts Academy, SAY Sí Youth Arts Program, the Young Women’s Leadership Academy, and the Henry Ford Academy: Alameda School for Art + Design.
To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Poetry on the Move contest, a collection of the last ten years of poems and illustrations will be available on the BiblioTech Link at https://library.biblioboard.com/module/via-poetry-on-the-move for everyone to enjoy.