International Youth Poetry Slam Festival - Washington, DC

The 11th Annual Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival is being held this year in Washington DC on July 15 - 19. The event will feature teen poetry slam champions from cities, rural, and suburban areas, from the Deep South, Native American reservations, Alaska, college towns — even from parts of Europe and Africa!

As part of the 6-day festival, there is a major Global Warming Spoken Word Program, the Grand Slam Finals of the International Youth Poetry Slam, a benefit concert, a town hall meeting on the State of the Union of Youth, many free writing and performance workshops, and more. This is not to be missed! Go out and support our local slam teams from Prince George’s County and DC.

For more information and tickets to the finals (if available), check out the Brave New Voices site.

Slam Poetry

I hope everyone had a nice holiday, time off from school, or whatever. I know I’ve been a little slack with the blog, but I was at a conference in NYC where I got to hear a lot of teen authors speak. While I was there, I also saw a group of students from an organization called Urban Word who performed slam poetry - which was way cool. Here is a performance from one of the annual Urban Word NYC Teen Poetry Slams:

Jaylene

I know we have a lot of teens in the county who are talented and interested in expressing themselves in a similar way. I am going to work on putting together some poetry programs and hope to see many of you come out and show your stuff!