Whiz Kid: Harriton Poet Elliot Levy

This week’s Whiz Kid: Elliot Levy

School: Harriton High School senior; Elliot lives in Wynnewood

Accomplishment: Levy won an annual open mic night poetry award at MilkBoy from the Mad Poets Society last year, he won for poetry in December, and most recently he was featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer as one of the top poets under the age of 30 in the Philadelphia area, as part of an April feature on National Poetry Month.

“I saw a documentary on poetry, and it was just about kids who were the same age as me, and they were doing poetry, and it looked very cool,” Levy said. “And I decided to try it. I wrote a couple poems on my own, but I never really shared them.”

Levy said his interest in poetry really took off when he started performing in public.

“I learned all about this whole dynamic, this coffee house dynamic. I met people I never would have met otherwise without poetry, and I think that’s one way how I really started,” Levy said.

Then, he started a poetry club at Harriton and started getting a good response.

“I wanted to bring that whole coffee house dynamic to my peers and to my school,” Levy said. “My mom’s kind of my agent, so she sends my stuff everywhere. People who hear about my stuff, they come up to me. It’s really nice.”

Key to awesomeness: “It might sound cliché, but maybe, just go out and do it—step out of your comfort zone,” Levy said. “It started out as something small, just as simple as showing up one night a week. And it matured into something I really enjoyed and has become part of my identity. I never would have said that if I hadn’t taken the initiative to try something new, something different.”