Catherine Sargeant and Nicolas Wolf have won this year’s Northampton Community College (NCC) Martin Luther King, Jr. prose and poetry contest.

Sargeant is a resident of Kunkletown who graduated from the Achievement House Charter School, a cyberschool. Her poem “Awaken Me” was inspired by her father’s re-enlistment in the Army shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The poem laments hatred and the widespread pain it causes throughout the world and expresses hope for enmity’s end.

“I hope that when people hear my poem,” she says, “they will see that what they say and do affects other people and that they will change.”

Sargeant is a sophomore at Northampton Community College, where she is majoring in general studies with the aim of entering the nursing program.

Wolf, a Bangor resident, is in his first year at Northampton Community College, where he is majoring in general studies and considering an academic career. He began writing poetry only 5 months ago, in a writing class at NCC.

His winning poem “Repentance” aims to re-create a sense of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. “I imagined what it must have felt like to strive for something that must have seemed unattainable at the time, a feeling I think of as ‘hopeless desire.’ ”

Although he was born decades after the civil rights movement, Wolf has a connection to it through his mother, who marched in Mississippi.

Criteria for judging entries were appropriateness to the theme of this year’s NCC commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Voting the Dream, skill of presentation, and creative and critical thinking.

Sargeant and Wolf will read their poems at Voting the Dream. The event is on January 26 at 6:00 p.m. at the Lipkin Theatre, Kopecek Hall, NCC Main Campus, 3835 Green Pond Road, Bethlehem Township.