​​Lillian Braly, a junior at Marin School of the Arts at Novato High School, won the 2026 California Poetry Out Loud State Championship at the finals held March 8–9 in Sacramento. She will represent California at the National Recitation Contest, April 27–29 in Washington, D.C., competing for approximately $50,000 in scholarship funds.

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Braly performed "Saturday's Child" by Countee Cullen, "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, and "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman. Click here to view her performance.

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"Poetry Out Loud was my very first chance to perform on a stage freshman year, and the joy of it has yet to leave me!"

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For more information, visit the California Arts Council press release. 

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2026 MARIN COUNTY POETRY FINALS

MARIN COUNTY POETRY OUT LOUD FINALISTS
Lillian Braly – Marin School of the Arts
Juno Phipps – Novato High School
Nate Lee – Tamalpais High School
Adeline Newby – The Branson School 

2026 JUDGES

Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain, finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound, finalist for the Julie Suk Award and recipient of an honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Award. She translated Max Sessner’s Whoever Drowned Here, finalist for the Northern California Book Award, from the German. Her work appears in ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Rattle. She is the Marin County Poet Laureate and a translation editor at the Los Angeles Review.

Tracy Jones is a poet, multidisciplinary artist, and literary citizen whose poems have been published in juried anthologies. She also experiments with filmmaking, performance, and interactive art. Tracy is a recent Center for Cultural Innovation grant recipient, is currently a Creative-In-Residence at the Ruby in San Francisco and serves on the board for the Marin Cultural Association. Additionally, she gives back as a South By Southwest Creative Economy Mentor, a TEDx Curator, and has served two terms on the board of directors for the Marin Poetry Center. Tracy was a judge for the inaugural Marin County Youth Poet Laureate program.

Molly Noble is an actor, director and teacher. She has directed and acted at College of Marin, Tam High ETC, SPARC, Word for Word, Shotgun Players, Cinnabar Theatre, Main Stage West, Spreckels, Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, West Marin Players, Boston Shakespeare Co. New Dramatists, and Ensemble Studio Theatre.  She is a member of PlayGround, The Bay Area’s leading incubator for new plays. In 2000, she founded the award-winning Porchlight Theatre Company in Marin County where she produced and performed classic plays under the redwoods and developed school tours featuring the lives and works of 20th century poets for several years. She holds a B.A. in English and Art History from Bowdoin College and trained at A.C.T. and Shakespeare & Company. She is on the faculty of College of Marin.

2026 Coach
Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş is a choreographer, writer, and filmmaker from Northern California currently researching the intersections of language and movement through interdisciplinary collaborations with composers, designers, animators, coders, writers, and dancers. Maxine graduated magna cum laude with a BFA in Dance from NYU Tisch. Her poetry, fiction, scores, essays, and interviews have appeared widely in Dance Art Journal, Samfiftyfour Literary, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Gallatin Review, October Hill Magazine, and VerbalEyze Press, where she published her first novella, through Eileen.

Learn more at capoetryoutloud.org