Poetry is Freeing: A Conversation with 2025 Poetry Out Loud Champion Isavel Mendoza

Isavel Mendoza was so surprised at being named the 2025 Poetry Out Loud National Champion, it took a gentle push to get him out onto the stage to accept the title. The shock—and joy—was written all over his face as he accepted the trophy, which came with a $20,000 cash prize.

Earlier this spring, Mendoza, representing Pennsylvania, competed against 54 other state and jurisdictional champions from across the country to become the National Champion—the 20th in the program’s 20-year history.

Now, Mendoza is gearing up for graduation from Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts and preparing to head off to Pace University where he will pursue his BFA in acting this fall. He also has plans to work in theater in New York City and hopes to publish some of his own poetry. We gave him a call a few weeks after his big win to discuss his Poetry Out Loud experience and how he will carry the lessons he’s learned into this exciting next chapter.

NEA: Can you start by telling me what your Poetry Out Loud experience was like, from start to finish?

Isavel Mendoza: This was my school's first time doing [Poetry Out Loud], and the head of the literary arts department brought it to the head of the theater department and was like, "I really want our kids to know what this is. We should try it out."

For a while I didn't really know how for real it was. So as it progressed, it got a lot more serious and a lot bigger in scale, and I was like, whoa, what is happening?

NEA: If you had to sum up your national finals experience in three words, what would those three words be?

Mendoza: Exhilarating, freeing, and connecting.

NEA: Can you choose one of those and expand on it?

Mendoza: I choose freeing and connecting. For freeing, I just felt so beyond myself when I was bringing that text to the stage and sharing it with all those people.

But connecting goes with that because in my being so free, I felt like I connected to not just people in the competition, but people watching at home and people watching in the audience. And I felt, "This is what I want to do." This sharing of art is what I want to do for the rest of my life. 

NEA: What are you going to take away from this competition as you enter the next phase of your life?

Mendoza: Poetry Out Loud made me realize that I can love all the things that I love about poetry, about theater all at once because I didn't know how connected they both were to each other. Experiencing that hand in hand made me love poetry so much more.

[This experience also] just legitimizes the fact that poetry is necessary and that you need art all the time. I truly, and I mean it when I say this, need the world to listen to artists more. I want people, especially my age, to start taking this seriously.

NEA: What would you tell students who might be intimidated by poetry as an artform?

Mendoza: Poetry is vulnerable, and that's the nature of it as an art form, as a literary technique. Poetry is vulnerable because of how much it lets you into someone. I feel like the only way for people to not just enjoy poetry but feel comfortable in sharing their own or free others is to be unafraid of that vulnerability and let that part of yourself exist and live with no problem.

Watch Medoza's interview immediately following the National Finals below!