Emily Padget If poetry were a team sport, Emily Padget would be captain.

The 16- year- old Richland Northeast High School junior, a student in two of the school's magnet programs (Horizon and Palmetto Center for the Arts/Literary Arts), recently won First Place in the South Carolina Young Poets Prize contest.

On December 16, she also won RNE's Poetry Out Loud competition, the first step in the national poetry recitation contest. She will go on to the Midlands Regional Competition on January 17 at 2 pm at Morris College in Sumter, where she will compete against other local winners from Aiken, Calhoun, Darlington, Dillon, Edgefield, Fairfield, Florence, Horry, Kershaw, Lee, Lexington, Marion, Marlboro, Newberry, Richland, Saluda, and Sumter counties.

The winner of that phase will compete on the state level in March.

Jasmine James was RNE's first runner up; Kenosha Parker was second runner up. Padget read "Litany" (Billy Collins) and "Planetarium" (Adrienne Rich); James read "Invictus" (William Ernest Henley) and "Salome" (Ai); and Parker read "Theme for English B" (Langston Hughes) and "Insomnia" (Elizabeth Bishop).

Competitors in the Poetry Out Loud contest, which was founded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, choose poems

from the Poetry Out Loud

anthology, then memorize them and present them in a live performance, which can incorporate elements of poetry slam and theatre as well as recitation.

This is the event's third year. Last year more than 200,000 students participated nationwide.