Director’s Note
Having completed another successful Young Poets Contest as part of 1455’s fourth annual Summer Fest, I can confirm two things: the contest attracts more diversity and talent each cycle, and choosing grand prize winners becomes more difficult. It’s a labor of love, and I’m grateful to all the poets from America and beyond for sharing their writing.
As a reminder, the theme for this year’s contest was Freedom, and the guidelines requested the poems to reflect on or react to the contemporary sociopolitical and cultural environment (including but not limited to #BLM, #MeToo, COVID, etc.); every poem that made the final cut successfully explored the guidelines, but the diverse and provocative variations on these themes were extraordinary. Just like previous years, some of the poems seemed pieced together by newspaper headlines; others invoked family histories (the kinds found in photo albums and especially the kinds kept secret or spoken about for the first time), and there were ingenious, if inevitable references to science, politics, ethnicity, anger, and shame.
Like the years preceding it, 2022 has been a period of disruption, polarity, anger, and confusion. During dark and complicated times, we look to our artists to find grace, beauty, and witness borne. As always, we hear our politicians and self-appointed spokespersons eager to opine (but seldom enlighten or console), and as ever, it’s our poets, whom Percy Bysshe Shelley famously declared “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” who best explain and interrogate our lives.
The Young Poet’s Contest winners gathered virtually to read their work during 1455’s Summer Festival last month. We encourage you to watch the recorded reading below to experience the winning poems read by their poets.
1455’s mission is to celebrate creativity and build community. We do this by encouraging storytellers, and poets are anything but unacknowledged in our corner of the world. Indeed, all our free programming is offered with the goal of connecting worthy storytellers and diverse audiences. If we’re able to showcase under-represented artists, all the better. And being able to support young writers is a critical and inextricable part of this process. We are proud and honored to shine a light on voices we can learn from, and as is so often the case, we stand to learn more from our young minds than they do from us.
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