When Emma Paris embarks on a new activity, “I really want to be perfect at it right from the get-go, which,” she admitted, “is not very realistic.” But sometimes it works out. She wrote her first poem when she was 11 years old, submitted it to a magazine and got published.
More good news came last month, when Paris, now 19, was named the 2025 Vermont youth poet laureate. The honor comes with a $500 award, an invitation to a regional competition and the opportunity to participate in virtual workshops led by renowned poets. Paris, of Putney, was selected by a three-judge panel on the basis of her poetry and her civic engagement. The runners-up were Mayla Landis-Marinello, 17, of Middlesex and Lylah Zeitlin, 16, of Woodstock.
“My interest is really embedded in the intersection of science and creative writing.” Emma Paris
Sundog Poetry runs the program in partnership with Urban Word, the New York City organization that founded the national youth poet laureate program. Ruth Stone House, Young Writers Project and the Flynn provide support.
Paris has just completed her first year at Bennington College, where she is studying poetry, ecology and the intersection of the two. She is the state’s second youth poet laureate, succeeding Warren’s Harmony Devoe, a 16-year-old sophomore at Harwood Union High School.
Devoe writes spoken-word poetry that focuses on social and environmental justice. In the past year, she has led a poetry workshop in Waitsfield and read her work at the Vermont Statehouse and alongside Rajnii Eddins, Adrie Kusserow and Vermont poet laureate Bianca Stone. Devoe participated in a workshop with U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón and will head to Washington, D.C., in July to join other youth laureates running a poetry event at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
Devoe advised Paris to take full advantage of the opportunities her new title affords. Paris spoke with Seven Days about her plans and her introduction, via emergency surgery, to life as a poet.
When did you start writing poetry?
I actually have a good story for this. I had an appendectomy when I was 11, and I started writing in the days, post-surgery, when I was on bed rest. And I never really stopped after that. It just took a really strong hold in my life, and I started taking classes and workshops and getting mentorships with local poets like Bianca Stone. I’ve also been close with Chard deNiord for a long time and Verandah Porche. So there have just been a lot of great poets in my life early on that have really shaped how I write.
How do you describe your poetry?
Experimental. My interest is really embedded in the intersection of science and creative writing. I’ve been doing a lot of work with the involvement of scientific data in my poetry and letting numbers determine line count, syllable count, etc. Earlier this year, I took some courses in ecology, and I got really inspired by some of the case studies, and I wanted to be writing about them. But I didn’t want it to stop at content. I wanted the poem to feel more involved with the study and the research. I had a bar graph of the population for gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park from the 1980s until about a year ago. I wanted to let the population count for each year be the same number of syllables in a line. When the poem was done, it mirrored the bar graph.
In addition to writing talent, the youth poet laureate award recognizes civic engagement. What activities do you participate in?
That part of the application was actually a little bit funny to me, because when you come from a small Vermont town, you’re so embedded in your community. And so I was realizing all of these things that I did, and that my family did, and that most people in Putney do, are considered civic engagement — when it just feels like being in community with others.
You now have a highly visible platform. What do you want to do as the 2025 Vermont youth poet laureate?
I have a lot of ideas for events to connect people. Something that I’m thinking about is how to connect people intergenerationally. How can we bring older poets and younger poets together for craft talks, to connect with people that don’t consider themselves poets and to engage in this intercultural and intergenerational conversation about what we have to offer each other creatively?
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Small Town Tragedy
The winter breaks my bones
and hugs the sugary chill to my arteries all at once.
Delicious and overpowering, I’m watching Frozen
on the tiny silver screen in the backseat and hugging
a soft pillow to my chest, for the first time.
She glides across the grimy screen like cold medicine,
unprescribed, but the possibility of her saving
my life is too great to pass up.
Elsa, I say afterwards, I want
to be you when I grow up.
It’s not actually winter here yet.
But outside, the last metallic November leaves
are desperate to decompose
like slow bird bodies, tiny bones and feathers askew;
we all sink into the sickly, untamed land.
Brushing brown, dead leaves from my chilled forehead
as the first snow begins to stew in the heavens.
We smelled it coming on the drive home.
The two of us. My mother and I.
The crisp frost snapped under my crocs and socks–
it hit deep ear, and stayed there.
I was almost afraid the car tires might burst
and the frozen bits would lay out upon
the road like raven scraps. Our town
being too cheapass and lazy to clean it up. The birds
get hit trying to peck out some good-life from roadkill.
We all do, but only talk about the birds because
it’s easier to talk about ravens getting run over
instead of the freezing homeless woman who lived
under our raggedy parking garage.
“Our favorite rat” my mother said. And the unwieldy
cruelty of it pierced my soft child heart.
Yet in the rearview mirror, I caught her tears on my tongue
like they were the first snowflakes, shaking like wet dogs
as they disappeared on the dash–
I look up out the window in premonition of a snowstorm,
eyes reflecting the subtle shining cold.
Imagine never being bothered by the snow.
Glimmering and merging with the clouds
like silverfish, quicksilver, silver dollars
to spend on a life with more parking meters.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Well Versed | Meet Bennington College student Emma Paris, Vermont’s new youth poet laureate”
This article appears in Jun 11-17, 2025.
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