Youth slam teams, festivals and poet laureates
Teams, festivals and laureates
A youth poet laureate is a young writer, usually between thirteen and nineteen, appointed for about a year by a city, a library or an arts organisation to represent poetry in public, and it is one of three routes out of a local open mic, alongside youth slam teams and festivals such as Brave New Voices.
All three are run by independent organisations with their own applications, deadlines, age limits and money. This page describes them as third parties, from what they publish about themselves; this reference selects for nobody, represents nobody, and has no connection to any organisation named on it.
What Brave New Voices is
Brave New Voices is an international youth poetry slam festival, first held in 1998 and founded by Youth Speaks, a non-profit based in San Francisco. It brings teams of young poets from cities across America and from other countries together for a week in a host city that changes from year to year, and it is a festival rather than only a competition: the days are made of workshops, open sessions and conversations, with scored bouts running alongside them and a final at the end.
It reached a much wider audience in 2009, when a documentary series titled Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices followed several teams across a season of episodes for HBO. That series is somebody else's work, and it is not hosted or embedded here. What it is useful for is showing an outsider what a team actually is, which is a group of young writers who have spent months in one room arguing about lines.
How a young poet gets on a youth slam team
A young poet gets on a youth slam team through a local organisation rather than by applying to the festival, and that is the part most often misunderstood. The festival takes teams; the teams are made at home, in this sequence.
- Join the weekly writing workshop a youth arts organisation, library or school runs, and keep turning up for a term.
- Compete in the local qualifying slam, usually open to anybody in that programme.
- Audition or place highly enough to be picked, typically for a team of four to six poets plus an alternate.
- Rehearse with a coach, including at least one group piece written and performed by several poets at once.
- Raise the money, because travel, accommodation and registration are real costs and most teams fundraise for them.
Group pieces are the part of team work with no equivalent at The open mic. Three or four voices split a poem between them, lines overlapping, doubled and handed on, and making one work takes weeks. It is the strongest argument for joining a team even if being scored never appeals, because writing to be said by somebody else changes how you write everything afterwards.
The festivals and citywide competitions
Festivals and citywide competitions sit between a weekly night and a national final, and the largest are run by youth writing organisations rather than by arts councils. Louder Than a Bomb, founded in Chicago in 2001 by Young Chicago Authors, grew into one of the biggest youth poetry festivals anywhere, with school and community teams competing across the city over several weeks. Other cities have built their own on the same model. In the United Kingdom the circuit is smaller and organised differently, through bodies such as The Poetry Society, which runs the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award for writers aged 11 to 17 and which ran SLAMbassadors, the national youth slam championship, from 2001 to 2018, and Leeds Young Authors, a youth writing organisation in the north of England which has run weekly workshops for years and sent teams to compete internationally.
| Organisation | Based in | What it runs | Usually open to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Youth Speaks | San Francisco | Brave New Voices, an international youth poetry slam festival | city teams, roughly thirteen to nineteen |
| Young Chicago Authors | Chicago | Louder Than a Bomb, a citywide youth poetry festival | school and community teams in the city |
| Urban Word | New York | a city youth poet laureate programme, and a national one with partners | individual young writers, by application |
| The Poetry Society | United Kingdom | the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award, free to enter; its SLAMbassadors youth slam ran 2001 to 2018 and is closed | writers aged 11 to 17 |
| Leeds Young Authors | Leeds, England | weekly workshops and a team that has competed internationally | young writers in and around the city |
Every line in that table summarises what those organisations publish about themselves, and every one of them changes: programmes pause, age brackets move, and a scheme that ran for a decade can stop. Take the current position from the organisation rather than from a reference page, including this one.
Youth poet laureate programmes
A youth poet laureate programme appoints one young writer, for a fixed term, to a named public role, and the appointment is made by a city or by an arts organisation working with one. Urban Word, based in New York, runs a city youth poet laureate programme and leads a national one with partner organisations, and Amanda Gorman was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017. Individual cities in several countries have since created their own posts, appointed and funded locally.
An application usually asks for four things: a portfolio of poems, a record of community or volunteer work, a written statement about what the applicant would do with the year, and an interview or audition. The role that follows is public and administrative as much as literary, which is worth knowing in advance: readings at civic events, workshops with younger writers, and a great deal of correspondence. A laureateship is not a prize for the best poem in the city. It is a job with a title on it.
What to check before you enter any of it
Before entering any of it, check six things, because a competition circuit for young people is still an arrangement between adults and children, and good organisations answer all six without being asked.
- Confirm the age range and the deadline from the organisation's own published information, for the current year.
- Ask what it costs in total, including travel, accommodation, registration and any entry fee, and who pays.
- Ask who is responsible for young people at the event, and what the safeguarding policy says.
- Ask what rights the organiser takes in the work, particularly where performances are filmed and published.
- Ask how many hours a week it takes, and set that against school.
- Refuse anything that asks a young writer to pay for the privilege of being published or shortlisted.
If there is no team where you are
Where there is no team there is still a circuit, and it starts smaller than any of the above. Spoken word poetry travels perfectly well through a lunchtime group of six, a school showcase, a library reading and a monthly open mic in the back of a cafe, and every poet on a national stage passed through some version of that first. The order those rooms usually come in, and what each asks, is mapped in The stage and its circuit. If competition is not the appeal at all, Recitation contests offer a route through schools that scores accuracy rather than authorship and needs no team, no travel and no fundraising.
The circuit is not a ladder anybody is obliged to climb. A writer who reads once a month in the same room for three years and gets better has done the thing this site is about. Teams, festivals and laureateships are options, and they are worth knowing about precisely so that choosing not to enter them can be a decision rather than an accident.