TURNER – Kate McKeown first heard about Poetry Out Loud in January, when a mid-term grade hinged on standing in front of the class and reciting a poem from memory.

She picked Sylvia Plath’s “Fever 103°” and the English class voted – she did the best. Three more wins later, and the Leavitt Area High School sophomore is off to Washington, D.C. next month for the nationals.

When McKeown was named state champ last weekend, “I was astounded. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what to do, I started crying,” she said, laughing Friday at the memory.

On stage at the Bates College Schaeffer Theatre, Maine’s first lady had even asked if she was OK. “I guess I looked pretty shaken up.”

Poetry Out Loud is a program by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, with the Maine Arts Commission a local partner. Students pick three poems from hundreds by established authors and deliver them in rounds.

It’s almost more performance piece than recitation, but gesture too much and you get points taken off your score, McKeown, 16, said. “It’s supposed to be about the words.”

“I really tried to submerge myself in the emotions that the author is trying to express. It’s all about what the poet was trying to say,” she said.

For her picks, “Fever 103°” is aggressive and angry, McKeown said. “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman is heartache, loss. And “Beauty,” by Tony Hoagland, “really speaks for itself,” she said.

McKeown won a regional speech competition in seventh grade; she was already comfortable on stage. She practiced the poems by mouthing words to herself, sometimes watching gestures in the mirror, and listening to critiques from her English teacher, Laura Mazzola.

Going into the state finals with nine other students, she said her mind wasn’t on winning. “I was around all these really cool people that I was so excited to meet.”

The Turner teen plays flute and piccolo in the school marching band. She wants to keep arts as a hobby – “(I) love reading, loving writing, all of the above” – but has career interests in biology.

The winner of the National Poetry Out Loud contest April 29 gets a $20,000 scholarship. Winning at the state level earned an all-expense-paid trip for her and a chaperone, likely her mom, Tish Clark. The whole family and Mazzola are all hoping to make the trip, McKeown said.

“I’m thrilled. I’m so, so happy,” she said. “Given the opportunity to go to D.C. and be able to compete is mind-boggling.”