Courtney Stewart, spoken like a champ

Courtney Stewart.David Marshall

Congrats to Courtney Stewart, the Springfield Central High School senior who’s been chosen the Bay State’s Poetry Out Loud champ — for the third time. Stewart was crowned at the Old South Meeting House, where he bested 24 other finalists. (First runner-up was Meloee Nazaire, from Revere High School, and second runner-up was Ben Cohen, a sophomore at Needham High School.) Stewart gets an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C., to compete in Poetry Out Loud’s National Finals in May. The competition, organized locally by the Huntington Theatre Company and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Poetry Out Loud celebrates the power of the spoken word and a mastery of public-speaking skills.