UMass Boston senior Meghan Chiampa stole the show at the 2007 Greater Boston Intercollegiate Poetry Festival, held April 18 at Boston College. Chiampa read two of her poems, “Kurt Vonnegut’s Heaven” and “Where the Blue Meets the Green on a Map.”

With eerie prescience, “Kurt Vonnegut’s Heaven” predicts the late author’s death at the age of 84, and describes a typically-Vonnegut conversation between a teenaged female narrator (also deceased) and the counterculture icon, which involves sex, drinking and ironic banter in the afterlife. Laughter swept the room at Chiampa’s straightforward, matter of fact reading of the verse. She followed with “Where the Blue Meets the Green on a Map,” a poem of cosmic scope that speaks of both the beauty of nocturnal moments and a communication breakdown.

The festival features one student poet from each of 20 participating universities in the Boston area, including Harvard, Boston University and Boston College, where the festival has been held for the last several years. Creative Writing professor Lloyd Schwartz chose Chiampa from the student body at UMass Boston.

Schwartz proudly spoke about the quality of Chiampa’s work and the program at UMass Boston. “Once again,” he noted after the reading, “I think we stole the show.”