Junior Carly Travell of Middleburg, VA, captured her class's Competitive Poetry Reading Prize for the third straight year and sisters Olivia and Rachel Means, of Washington, DC, gave the weekend a family flavor with victories in two rather different events during Foxcroft School's Paul K. Bergan Poetry Festival, held Jan. 19-20.

Olivia Means, a junior, was named the 2008 Poetry Slam Champion Friday evening after animated performances of original poems about Calculus class and dorm life. Her sister Rachel, a senior, earned top honors among English 401 students in Saturday afternoon's competitive reading with her rendition of "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou.

Travell's outstanding rendition of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" wowed the judges and kept her undefeated in three years of competitive readings.

Sophomore Gabrielle Graves, also of Middleburg, and Taylor Reis, a freshman from Great Falls, VA, were the winners in English 201 and 301, respectively, at the competition, held in Foxcroft's FoxHound Auditorium and judged by visiting poets Sandra Beasley and Joanna Lin Want.

Saturday afternoon's readings culminated two days of concerts, contests, readings and workshops organized by Foxcroft English Department chair Stewart Herbert and colleagues Mia Noffsinger, Glenn Kantz and Ruth Marshall. The festival is a longtime Foxcroft tradition but was named in honor of Bergan, a beloved English teacher, last spring on the occasion of his retirement.

In recognition of Bergan's contribution to the poetic life of the School, Herbert, Kantz and the many students who had Bergan for English 101 stood and recited "Invictus" Friday evening to kick off the first festival bearing his name.

The festival kicked off Friday night with a free-wheeling evening of performance poetry and coffee-house entertainment.

Olivia Means earned $100 to lead a Junior Class sweep of the Slam. Adele Chatfield-Taylor (Nantucket, MA) collected $50 for placing second while Kayleigh Moerhle (Frederick, MD) took the $25 third prize. Senior Sallie Dumont (Middleburg), junior Korama Danquah (Los Angeles) and freshman Cynthia Onukwugha (Columbus, NJ) were the other finalists, who advanced from among a field of 13.

Saturday morning, Beasley, who earned the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize for her book Theories of Falling, and Want, an instructor at Western Michigan University who received Honorable Mention from the Academy of American Poets in 2006, read original works in Currier Library. The two poets also visited several English classes on Friday.

In Saturday's competitive readings, Graves read "A Girl's Garden, by Robert Frost and Reis read Shakespeare's "Sonnet 56" to win their classes. The other finalists, who had all been recommended by their peers and qualified by faculty judges in two previous rounds of competition, were seniors Michael Babus (Middleburg) and Adrienne Teeley (Round Hill, VA) in English 401 competition; sophomore Grace Murphy (Middleburg) and junior Camille Barbour (Jackson, MS) in English 301; sophomores Lindsay Allardyce (Arlington, VA) and Lindsey Yales (Charlotte, NC), in English 201 and freshmen Effie Kilmer (Westhampton Beach, NY) and Jessa Hurst (Bluemont, VA) for English 101.

Open readings rounded out the weekend Saturday. In a session reflecting the diversity of the Foxcroft community, 15 students and teachers read poetry in languages other than English, ranging from French and German to Mandarin, Hawaiian and Krygis. Faculty sharing original poems and favorite published poems.