Books were organized all over the library to show how their titles created clever poems.

There are thousands of books, many with similar themes and titles. That was part of the challenge when the Middle School Media Center brought back a poetry contest in which students had to put together book titles.

The poems could be as long or short as students’ wished, but the difficult part was finding just the right combination. There were a lot of students who were ready for the challenge, 65 students entered, “we always have a lot of participation,” says Media Specialist Bev Rannow, “but I think that’s the best turnout we’ve had.”

Rannow says there were a lot of good poems submitted, “a lot of clever ones,” she adds. She reached out to several teachers to help decide the winners.

The idea was to put them together as if someone wrote the poem from scratch, “so that they have a message, a feeling, an idea or thought,” Rannow explains, “so they’re cohesive, not random.”

Two students were given the top prize of an M89 gift card, Brennan Richardson (7^th grade) and Alexia Navarro (8^th grade.) Three students were awarded a second prize of a glow-in-the-dark water bottle from the Otsego District Library, Rebecca Roberts, Tryston Pion and Makenna Black. They are all in 7^th grade.

Here are the winning poems: