Dr. Lucia Cherciu Shares the Importance of Poetry
As a child in Romania, Dr. Lucia Cherciu knew that she would one day grow up to teach literature. As the 2021 Dutchess County Poet Laureate and professor of English and writing at Dutchess Community College, it is safe to say that she is doing what she set out to do.
In the earliest days of her education, “poetry was seen with a great deal of respect,” she explained. Students learned to recite poetry by heart, some of which she can still remember to this day. It was when she got to high school that she realized her love of languages and chose to pursue a major in English with a minor in Romanian.
Since moving to the United States at the age of 22, her passion and genuine love for writing and literature is what has earned her the title of Dutchess County Poet Laureate, as she spends her days sharing the importance of poetry with the community and her students.
As explained by the Dutchess County Government site, the process began with a call for nominations, review and selection by a panel, and finally, Cherciu was appointed by Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro.
“My role as the Dutchess County Poet Laureate for 2021 has been to encourage students to write, has been to spread the word about the role of poetry in our lives,” explained Dr. Cherciu. She has accomplished this through a variety of initiatives, but is guided by a series of important principles and objectives.
“One of my goals as the Dutchess County Poet Laureate is to work on diversity, equity, and inclusion,” she explains. Something extremely important to Dr. Cherciu is making sure that more poets of color, poets who are bilingual, poets who are immigrants, and poets who write in different styles are included, recognized, and able to communicate and come together.
One affair in particular that aligns with these goals has been in collaboration with Arts Mid-Hudson, a nonprofit organization in Poughkeepsie focused on providing the Mid-Hudson region with the arts, through events in collaboration with artists, authors, and local schools. This specific initiative is known as “Poetry in the High School.”
“What that means is that a group of four poets, including myself, will work on collaborating in order to organize visits to the local high schools, and the beauty of this program is that all of the writers included are diverse,” she says. “The goal of this program that we’re working to develop is to bring poetry in the high school so that local students can see themselves represented in the poets who come to work with them.” The poets taking part in this program include David Gonzales, Molly McGlennen, and Saida Agostini Bostic.
Cherciu has worked with younger students as well, in a service learning project she has been developing with Dutchess Community College for the past five years. At Morse Elementary School in Poughkeepsie, her college students have worked with two teachers, Mrs. Jennifer Ennist and Mrs. Cheryl Mongroo, as well as their students, to write poetry together. Because the pandemic prevented this from occurring normally, Cherciu got creative by organizing a zero-contact poetry contest for the elementary school students to take part in.
While the work she does outside of DCC benefits many students within the community, the genuine passion and love she has for writing is clear to her own students as well. She explains that because her classes are so diverse, she wants to give her students the opportunity to express their unique voices and experiences through their work.
“I’m in love with reading, I’m in love with poetry, and I want my students to fall in love with poetry as well.”
The ability to get her students to tap into their emotions and experiences is something she has learned after years of writing, both as a child in Romania, as well as an adult in the United States. As she works on her next book of poems, she’s had to confront the feelings associated with leaving her home and family so many years ago to tell the stories she wants to tell. As difficult as it can be to face feelings of longing and missing loved ones head on, Cherciu feels that poetry has allowed her to express those feelings.
“I feel as if I have this sense of responsibility, accountability, that life is short, and we don’t have time,” she explains. “We have to tell people in our lives how much we love them, how much we respect them, how much they mean to us while they are here.”
Being transparent about the difficult aspects of life is hard enough. To share those experiences with the world is even harder. Yet, to be able to do so through poetry is a skill that Dr. Lucia Cherciu continues to utilize with each poem she writes.
