The Warren County Community College Visiting Authors Series in April featured a reading by the winners of the 2017 Warren County High School Fiction and Poetry Contests, as well as the student authors of WCCC whose work appears in this year’s edition of Ars Poetica, the Student Art and Literary Magazine.

There were 126 submissions received from all Warren County high schools, as well as from some home-schooled students.

“There were many outstanding submissions,” said WCCC Professor BJ Ward. “It was very difficult to narrow it down to just a few.”

The winners of the Fiction Contest are: first place, Alexandria Lorett Crosson of Phillipsburg High School for her story, “Incessant Post-Its”; second place to Amanda Ackerman, Hackettstown High School, for “The Last Ten Years”; and third place, Michelle Rajan, Phillipsburg High School, for “Roots.”

The winners of the Poetry Contest are: first place, Samantha Bittenbender of Belvidere High School, for her piece, “Sweet and Sinful Memories”; second place to Home schooler Kimberly Harbison, for “Hard Edges”; and third place, to Rosemarie Tharp from Warren County Technical School, for “Ode to Books.”

(Photo from left to right: Professor BJ Ward,  Ars Poetica Co-Editor-in-Chief Kyle Beam, high school winners Samantha Bittenbender, Kimberly Harbison, Michelle Rajan, Alexandra Lorett Crosson, and Rosemarie Tharp, Ars Poetica Co-Editor-in-Chief Andrew Acuna, and Professor Brian Bradford at Warren County Community College. Photo Credit: Amanda Sportiello)

The Visiting Authors Series is supported by a grant from the Warren County Cultural and Heritage Commission. All facilities comply with ADA regulations and are fully accessible. Sign language interpreters are available with two weeks’ notice.

Warren County Community College offers students the option of earning an Associate of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, the first and only degree of its kind in New Jersey and only the fourth in the nation to be recognized as a viable A.F.A. by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). For more information about the Visiting Authors Series or the A.F.A. in Creative Writing,visit www.warren.edu or call 908-835-9222.