Director’s Note
Having completed another successful Teen Poetry contest as part of 1455’s third annual Summer Fest, I can confirm two things: the contest gets bigger and better each cycle, and choosing a grand prize winner becomes more difficult. It’s a labor of love, and I’m grateful to all the teen poets from America and beyond for sharing their writing. I’m also proud to note that we more than doubled last year’s total of poems; over 130 submissions were received and, once again, narrowing that down to ten proved almost impossible.
As a reminder, the theme for this year’s contest was Finding Community During Crisis, 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 last year, 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. This being a heavy subject, the weight of these collective words was not inconsiderable, but like the best art, these poems inspire dialogue, they seek understanding, they inspire solidarity. In a time where we’re seeing a general lack of courage and common sense (by our elected leaders, by our neighbors), these poems are at once an indictment and an aspiration to our better angels.
This past year has been a period of intense turmoil and disruption; it’s also been a time of grace, generosity, 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.
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 of our free programming is offered with the goal of connecting worthy writers 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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