This year, our annual Living Word Festival takes a fresh new form, as we curate several productions to be spread out throughout the year! Stay tuned to the Living Word Project section for details on future productions by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Ise Lyfe, The Suicide Kings, iLL-Literacy, Michelle "Mush" Lee, and more!

The Living Word Festival is an annual community gathering of artists, educators, presenters and performers who take three days each fall to focus on literacy education and literary performance. Developed by Youth Speaks/ The Living Word Project in 2001, the Festival annually serves as an opportunity for authors to network across genre, and disparate communities to discover new realities and common ground through literature. Most importantly, The Living Word Festival challenges writers to re-visit the infinite possibilities and functions for the word, creating an environment that is conducive to artistic growth and ripe for presenting groundbreaking material.

During the course of the three day festival, our programmatic goals are to showcase the flavor and vitality of our local artists to a national audience, and to infuse these performances and presentations with lively intergenerational discussion about the role of creative writing in social transformation. Among the thematic staples of these goals are:

• •A presentation of local and national artists who are exploring new modes of literary performance including spoken word theater. Such artists have included Sarah Jones, De/Cipher, Aya DeLeon, and Ursula Rucker. Youth focused programming which allows our future literary establishment to voice their thoughts and share their work among an audience of their peers and mentors.

• •A public intergenerational dialogue about the state of the word. We envision a more integrated patronage and candid perspective from these discussions in which the 17 year olds who come to support a fellow Thurgood Marshall schoolmate sit side by side with their elders who have attended specifically to hear such pioneers as Sonia Sanchez, Jessica Haggedorn or Piri Thomas share their wisdom.

• •Interdisciplinary Collaborations. We encourage literary artists to initiate projects which integrate different artistic disciplines into their work. Such pairings have produced exemplary work by Paul Flores, The Marcus Shelby Orchestra, The Savage Jazz Dance Company, among several others

• •Panels and workshops. The bedrock of the Living Word Festival are these focused opportunities for publishers, educators, writers, and audiences to engage in meaningful discussion about literature without the confining contours of the scholastic context. Panels are moderated by acclaimed poets, stand-out community activists, and best-selling authors including Dave Eggers, Carl Hancock Rux, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Beth Lisick.

Through these activities, Youth Speaks/The Living Word Project hopes to develop, expose, and educate Bay Area audiences about the diverse possibilities of the literary experience. We endeavor to bolster the Bay Area’s capabilities to support meaningful engagements between artists, audiences, and the communities that support them. The Living Word Festival reaches a broad demographic of arts supporters and enables emerging artists to build a foundation for their industry. Given its strong programmatic history, and its tremendous groundswell of grassroots support, Youth Speaks/The Living Word Project is poised to make the Living Word Festival the West Coast’s premier assembly of practitioners of the literary arts.