l BNV 2008 IN WASHINGTON D.C. l BNV & HIP HOP l BNV USHERING A GREEN AMERICA l

Coming July 2008:
Brave New Voices 2008 in Washington DC

We are currently gearing up for the eleventh annual Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival (BNV), taking place July 15th through the 19th, for the first time in the Nation’s Capital. Youth Speaks Director of National Initiatives Hodari Davis has been working diligently to establish the partnerships, facilitate the conversations and plan the schedule for the entire festival. This year is shaping up to be the greatest BNV ever, with premiere events taking place at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Howard University and the Historic Lincoln Theater. We are confident that teams from around the country will be amazed by this once in lifetime experience.

Registration for the festival will open in late November and teams will be encouraged to secure their spots. We are unable to have more than 48 teams participate in the Slam itself, although there are many opportunities for other youth to participate. Stay in touch for details about how to register a team and be involved.

Local collaborative partners include DC Writers Corps, PGC Creative Writing Alliance, and Sol y Soul, who are putting together many of the local programs, and a body of youth who will serve as local ambassadors for the traveling teams. This year we are also working with The Hip Hop Theater Festival, one of the most influential Hip Hop performing arts organizations in the country - as the DC Festival takes place the week before BNV, we have added some collaborations as a bonus to the greater DC community and to the participants of BNV.

BNV and Hip Hop

In the Festival evaluations from 2006, several participants expressed concern and frustration that our festival was becoming progressively more “Hip Hop.” Several others requested more rappers to be present. The quote below captures the attitude of those who are concerned about the growing influence of Hip Hop culture on the Brave New Voices Festival.

“…There are a million writing styles from all over the country and hip hop is not only over-represented, the judges are biased towards it! Teams like Ann Arbor write beautifully, but were overshadowed by flashy teams with Hip Hop pieces. Not all kids like Hip Hop music.” – Anonymous BNV participant

Recognizing that Hip Hop culture has become one of the most influential cultural phenomenon of this century, and especially of the generation of those who organize and attend the event, we cannot at all discount the role Hip Hop has played in shaping this work and our activism. In this way we do not see Hip Hop as solely a musical form, but as a cultural form that is consistent with many of the values and principles of the Brave New Voices Movement.

“The idea of the Hip Hop Generation brings together time and race, place and poly-culturalism, hot beats and hybridity. It describes the turn from politics to culture, the process of entropy and reconstruction. It captures the collective hopes and nightmares, ambitions and failures of those who would otherwise be described as “post-this” or “post-that.” - Jeff Chang, Prelude Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.

We are proud to place this festival and our work along this continuum. We seek to empower those youth who do not see this work as part of the greater Hip Hop cultural continuum to commune with those who do, and encourage them to be moved and transformed. Two years ago at Brave New Voices in New York City, a young poet sporting a Mohawk, tattoos and piercings, rapped for a group of Hip Hop heads and spoken word poets in an MC Workshop. His genre was punk rock, but it was obvious by the raucous response from his hip hop peers that he was not only embraced but encouraged to continue to develop his style. This is the spirit of our Festival – young people opening themselves up to the values and styles of others.

Brave New Voices encourages creative and intelligent youth, and provides fun and challenging opportunities for them to express themselves. Much of this work is directly influenced by Hip Hop. Not all, but it is safe to say that without Hip Hop, this festival would not exist and Youth Speaks as an organization would not exist. Hip Hop culture has helped fuel the growth and power of the Spoken Word Movement. It’s not all there is to Spoken Word, but we don’t feel you can separate the two. Hip Hop is not rap music. Hip Hop is culture.

With all this said, we are sensitive to the comments and criticisms we receive in our evaluations, and take to heart everything that is said and use the feedback, positive and negative, to make the festival better and more inclusive each year. Though I have my own attachment to Hip Hop, I am and will continue to be mindful of the diverse voices and perspectives we have at our Festival, and will continue to seek to find ways to schedule and structure events.

Sincerely,

Hodari B. Davis
Director of National Initiatives
Youth Speaks

Brave New Voices ushering a Green America

In November 2007 four members of the Brave New Voices Network traveled to Chicago Illinois, to perform at the largest Green Festival in the United States known as Green Build. This conference boasted over 20,000 attendees including former President Bill Clinton, environmental guru Paul Hawken, and a host of other leaders in the Sustainability Movement. After a series of stellar performances from Jared Paul, of Providence, Dawn Maxey of Stanford University, this years BNV Sundance Winner Kiyra Traber of the Bay Area, and the winner of the first BNV Sundance Global Warming poetry competition, George Watsky, Youth Speaks was positioned as a key organization working to forward the sustainability movement and to inspire young people to become champions for the environment.

This event is a culmination of two years of partnership with the Robert Redford Sundance Institute who, inspired by the words of our youth, have worked with us to facilitate our Sundance event as part of our BNV festival. Each year this event has gotten bigger and better, as youth from around the country, ages 13 – 24 compete for the opportunity to travel on behalf of Youth Speaks to some of the key conferences and summits on the Environment to date.

Thus far, winners and participants have performed at the United States Mayors Conference, where over 70 of the nations Mayors convene to discuss environmental responsibility and accountability; the Power Shift Conference which was a convening of 5000 young people in Washington DC to lobby against Global Warming; and of course the Green Build conference where engineers and architects gather to be introduced to new technology and be inspired to save the earth. We are honored to work with all of the groups to forward this cause and to lend our voices to the movement to end global warming and encourage environmental stewardship.