Cory Booker Reads Poetry from Senate Pages Competition Winners

Senate Pages Poetry Competition

• 💡 Senator Cory Booker, alongside Senator Katie Britt, judged a poetry competition for Senate pages.
• ⚠️ Initially, participation was low, requiring an extended deadline and personal encouragement from Booker to engage the pages.
• 🌟 Booker expressed surprise at the exceptional quality of the poems, finding them difficult to judge.
• 📜 All submitted poems were entered into the Congressional Record to preserve their work.

Award-Winning Poems

• 🏆 The competition featured three categories: an honorable mention, a personal choice by Booker, and two bipartisan choices.
• 🏅 Liliana Grinberg received an honorable mention for her poem reflecting on the Capitol's duality.
• 💔 Lucas Hogan's poem, "Moments of Silence," powerfully addressed school violence and political inaction, deeply moving Booker.
• 🌟 Addison Norris's poem explored themes of faith, doubt, and the nature of goodness amidst hardship.
• 🤝 Emma Ross won a top honor with a poem about feeling lost in the Senate but finding purpose in pursuing great dreams.

Booker's Original Poem and Final Words

• ✍️ Inspired by the pages, Booker shared his own hastily written poem, emphasizing that greatness is forged through overcoming lows, not just highs.
• 🗣️ He encouraged the pages to remember their experiences and the grit they gained, urging them to litter the world with kindness, decency, and love.
• 💔 Booker shared a personal story about failing to offer socks to a homeless man, highlighting his own missed opportunity to show kindness and the importance of moral imagination.
• ✨ He stressed that the country needs the pages' heart, spirit, brilliance, and kindness to build a more perfect union, echoing the sentiment of 'E pluribus unum' – out of many, one – by emphasizing the need to love one another.