Celia Hernandez, Contributing Photographer

Shawn Douglas Jr., a senior at a local New Haven high school, had a stutter growing up. On Saturday evening, he won third place at a local poetry slam, securing his spot to represent Connecticut in a national tournament for the second time this summer.

Eleven New Haven teenagers competed in the Word’s Youth Poetry Slam at the Neighborhood Music School on Saturday, with the top four poets heading to the Brave New Voices Youth Poetry Festival in June.

“The way I conveyed my emotions [when I was growing up] was through writing. As an art to tune your spiritual health and cognition, writing literature is a great tool,” Douglas said.

Brave New Voices brings together over 500 young people and artists from across the world in an annual four-day festival of workshops, showcases and slam competition. This year the festival will be held in Madison, Wisconsin.

Since 2023, the Word — a spoken word poetry education program in New Haven — has organized and funded a Connecticut team to travel to Brave New Voices. The team also visits local attractions, monuments and museums while attending the festival.

“It’s about the poetry, camaraderie, friendship, it’s not really about the competition at all,” Sharmont “Influence” Little, New Haven’s poet laureate and a teaching artist at the Word, said. “It’s about building community.”

The top four poets — Journey, Anna, Shawn and Amya — will work with coaches at the Word to improve their poetry and stage presence before travelling to Brave New Voices.

All of Saturday’s poets were from New Haven County, although the competition was open to all Connecticut youth.

During the school year, the Word works in middle and high schools in New Haven, often using poetry as a means of resolving classroom issues. The group focuses on teaching kids how to perform and use literary, sensory and writing devices to express themselves. 

“We can take a class that has been very negative, and have them write and perform a bunch of poems all complimenting their classmates. It’s a whole 180,” Jason Johnson Dorsey, a teaching artist at the Word said.

At the slam, the poets prepared original poems on a range of personal themes from race, to family dynamics to life in high school. Across the three rounds, they performed 1 to 3 minute poems.

Five judges — including two Yale undergraduates — rated the poems on a scale of 1 to 10. The middle three scores were added for a cumulative score.

The audience was encouraged to cheer or snap at moments of the poems that resonated with them, as well as express their agreement or disagreement with the judges’ scores at the onset of the slam.

 “I’m really interested in what people are going to do with imagery and what stories they will tell,” Anouk Yeh ’26, a judge, said. “Slam is one of the most personal forms of poetry and of art, so I’m excited to hear what the poets have to say.”

The first-place winner took home $500, while second, third and fourth place received $300, $200 and $100, respectively.

The Brave New Voices Youth Poetry Festival will take place from July 16 to 19.