DUBOIS – What sets the stage for a delicious Italian meal? An expressive, or perhaps, romantic sonnet while you wait to be seated?
Poetry written by students in the Young Publishers Club at the DuBois Area Middle School has been mounted and displayed at Luigi’s Ristorante on Brady Street.
According to club adviser Anthony Vallone, associate professor of English at Penn State DuBois, the students started out this fall with a focus on poetry and with a goal to make the students’ work as public as possible. In their earlier assignments, Vallone said, the students wrote Haikus and odes which were displayed on posters throughout the middle school. Vallone and wife Jackie Atkins, senior instructor in English at Penn State DuBois, advise the club together, meeting weekly with the dozen or so students after school.
“I wanted to try to get something out of the school, and so I asked Ed Tate if he would be willing to put up some poems the students had written,” Vallone said. “As kind of an incentive, I told him I would write a poem about Luigi’s, which was part of the fun of the assignment. Jackie also wrote a poem of her own, so those two are up there as well as the students’ work.”
Vallone said the final project of the semester will be to combine all the students’ poetry into a “chapbook,” a small book or pamphlet of poetry, and present poetry readings to family and friends at Penn State DuBois at 4 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 14, at the Smeal building conference room. The public is welcome to attend.
Projects lined up for the spring include journalism, short stories and fiction, Vallone said, and plans for the students to write and produce a play.