Hunter College High School senior Miles Hardingwood has been chosen as the 2023 National Student Poet for the northeast.
Hardingwood, who lives in Brooklyn, is among five regional youth poets chosen annually from among the winners of the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, a competition run by the nonprofit Alliance for Young Artists & Writers.
“I am thrilled to be joining four other phenomenal artists as National Student Poets,” Hardingwood said. “I’m looking forward to a year of service and learning and I’m grateful to the Hunter community for supporting me as I develop my artistic voice”
Hunter College Campus Schools Director Lisa Siegmann shared that, last June, Hardingword performed one of his spoken-word pieces before a school assembly of more than 1,200 enraptured students and faculty members. “They gave him a standing ovation,” she said.
The National Student Poets receive a $5,000 stipend and serve for a year as ambassadors promoting poetry and literacy through service projects, workshops, and public readings. The program is considered the country’s highest honor for youth poets doing original work.
Hardingwood — who co-founded PASSWord, the school’s poetry slam/spoken word club — served as a 2022 NYC Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador and has attended the Kenyon and Iowa Young Writers programs. His poetry received a Scholastic Art & Writing Awards National Gold Medal and an American Voices Medal, and he has performed it at Federal Hall in downtown Manhattan, the Schomburg Center in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Vice President Kamala Harris’s Black History Month celebration in Washington, D.C. He is also vice president of HCHS’s Black Student Union.
Hunter College High School is one of two publicly funded schools for gifted and talented students operated under the auspices of Hunter College. It has produced a panoply of American luminaries, including composer, lyricist, and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda; actor and writer Ruby Dee; Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan; and poet and activist Audre Lorde.
