After two years, Wordfest will be back for DHS students to attend and participate in-person.

Wordfest is an art and poetry competition held every school year developed by the DHS Word Warriors’ club Advisor, Justin Hitchcock. It is a way for DHS students to share what’s important to them.

This year’s Wordfest was decided to be held in-person since “we had one that was synchronized, where we did a youtube live so choosing to do it in-person this year is just kind of getting us back to where we were before the pandemic and having a large school event where everyone can kind of get together and celebrate something fun in a meaningful way” said Hitchcock

Melissa Teel and her poetry class along with Hitchcock’s  Word Warriors club, will be working together on this year’s Wordfest “to make sure that we have you know, a smooth event and everything goes well” he said.

“Wordfest is gonna be held in-person for the first time in a long time, so that is very exciting, it’s gonna take place over two days, that’s April 13th and April 14th in the auditorium”, said Hitchcock. “The first block of each day is only gonna have one session, we have [it as] one session for set up, and then wordfest starts sessions 2 of block 1. The final day of Wordfest is going to be basically when the competition starts and the final block of the day being where everyone is kind of competing for the title of Wordfest Champion.”

 This year’s theme for Wordfest is New Beginnings, to match the idea that it has not been celebrated for two years and begin a new fresh start. “I expect that a lot of students will be talking about their emotions as we just had kind of two years of craziness and uncertainty, and definitely affected them, right? Being in lockdown and isolation will definitely kind of cause us to look inwards and talk about our own emotional experiences” Hitchcock said. 

For Hitchcock, Wordfest “is a place for students to overcome fear, to take the stage, and to do something that may be unlike their past selves but might help them kind of take the next step into being a more confident person in their ideas and in their writing.”