St. Joseph Notre Dame High School (SJND) has named Beatrice Levy the school’s 2017-2018 Poet Laureate. The school made the announcement at Prisms’ annual Evening of Readings and Music. Prisms is the school’s literary art magazine. 

English workshop teacher Elizabeth Norris noted that she’s had Levy in mind as a potential Poet Laureate since she taught her in the sixth-grade poetry workshop. That same workshop opened a new world for Levy. 

“Before that workshop, I had just kept my writing attempts to myself,” Levy told the SJND News. 
“Poetry is something that needs to be awakened in us,” Norris told the Alameda Sun in a 2015 interview. “There’s poetry inside us and we just don’t realize it or achieve it, or let it see the light.”
Norris calls Levy’s body of poetry “extraordinary.”

“It really never occurred to me that my poetic thoughts would be anything that others would want to hear. She said that the workshop taught her the power of shared words. “Beautiful, precise wording creates a link between people, and I made it my goal to create more of those links,” she said. 

Levy said that she prefers free-verse poetry. SJND News tells us that she “likes to take a very tiny, distinct subject, like the smell of a favorite sweater, or the crooked shape of someone’s smile, and explore that image on a deeper-scale.”

“I love the compact precision of a really successful poem, the freedom I feel when I write and the pleasure I get from expressing something that friends can relate to,” she said.
“Poetry is a very flexible, portable art. I can write a poem almost anywhere,” she told the News. 

While her future plans are unwritten, Levy said that she may pursue a career in the science or medical fields. She will continue to write.