The Poetry Issue
We are pleased to announce the winners of the Fifth Annual 1455 Young Poets Contest. The theme for this year’s contest is Connection, 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.)
Once again, we received an astonishing variety of poems, and as was the case in previous years, the overall quality of the writing exceeded all expectations. On one hand, this made for some difficult decisions; on the other hand, based on this sample of young writers, the future of poetry will be diverse, passionate, and brilliant.
The judges, myself and Maia Siegel, admired the range of voices and quality of expression, but—like previous years!—some excruciating choices had to be made. As such, it was with no small relief that we had consensus regarding the ultimate finalists. Check out the reading on YouTube.
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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