Matt Weinberger
Shasparay will debut a new play at the Brave New Voices festival in Madison.
A festival that aims to provide an outlet for teenage angst could not come at a better time, says co-producer Darius Parker. “Our young people are holding a whole bunch of things, specifically now in 2025. We’re still dealing with pandemic fallout, mental health, bullying, school, problematic adults and relationships,” says Parker, of the Brave New Voices festival, to be held July 16-19 downtown and on the UW-Madison campus.
Parker says the festival gives young people an outlet to help them process some of their internal angst and emotion.
Hundreds of teenage and young adult poets and spoken word artists from around the country will arrive in Madison for the four-day festival to compete in poetry slams and also take part in workshops and other events. They’ll discuss a range of issues and possible solutions to the problems they see in the world today. Last year the festival was held in Washington, D.C.
“We need to make room for [young people] to express themselves creatively. And the arts [in general] are a vehicle for this but with the spoken word, they are able to actually get those thoughts out of their heads, onto the page, and then onto the stage,” says Parker. “We think about slam poetry as being that vehicle for healing, for change and for resistance.”
The festival was created in the late 1990s by the San Francisco-based nonprofit literary arts education organization Youth Speaks.
“It was created as a slam space for young people across the country to come together for days of fellowship, for writing workshops, for the slam competition, for town halls, and for community building and connection with other young artists and young creatives, specifically around poetry and spoken word,” says Bijou McDaniel, Youth Speaks’ director of digital pedagogy and communications. “It’s really morphed into this massive festival where we’ve had between 300-600 young people come each year, including international teams.”
Judges include Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, Ali Muldrow and Dasha Kelly Hamilton.
July 16-19 performances and workshops will take place downtown and on the UW-Madison campus, including at the Wisconsin Historical Society, the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra Center for Music and the Wisconsin Union Theater. The performance events are free and open to the public.
Public events begin on July 16 at the Wisconsin Historical Society with an opening ceremony that includes young poets and artists sharing live poetry, music and more, followed by an event called Queeriosity, described on the event website as “a space for LGBTQIA+ youth and their allies to come together and celebrate their voices and art on their own terms” with a showcase, an open mic, and a ball. “This is a place for young queer people to get fierce and get free.”
On July 17, a town hall will explore how art can be activism and how poetry can help people share stories and address important global and local issues. A workshop will coach attendees on strategies for supporting each other and organizing their communities for change. UW-Madison alumna Shasparay will debut her play Body Politics that evening.
On, July 18, the poetry slam competition begins with two semifinal rounds at the WYSO Center. That evening, UW-Madison’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives will host a curated event showcasing poetry from OMAI First Wave scholars, alumni and special guests.
The fest concludes on July 19 with the youth poetry slam finals at the Wisconsin Union Theater. The top four teams of four to six members from more than a dozen cities around the country will compete to see who takes home the title of Brave New Voices festival champion for 2025. Grammy Award-winning artist Tank from Tank & the Bangas will be the featured performer.
While events are free and open to the public, space is limited and tickets — available via youthspeaks.org — are required. Donations are also accepted and local residents can also sign up to be volunteers.
As a host of this year’s festival, UW-Madison OMAI director Sofía Snow and the university’s First Wave Hip-Hop and Urban Arts program students see it as a great opportunity.
“We're really excited to host young people from all over the world right here in Madison,” says Snow. “Hopefully, this is just the beginning of really catalyzing what it means to support young people and their creativity, but also support their vision for the world that we so desperately need to grow into.”
The Brave New Voices competition also played a part in founding UW’s First Wave program.
“One of the driving forces behind the First Wave program was to provide four-year, full tuition scholarships for hip-hop and urban art students, with the young people of Brave New Voices in mind,” Snow says, noting that a number First Wave graduates also competed in Brave New Voices festivals.
Snow adds that poetry and programs like First Wave and Brave New Voices foster the growth and strength that young people need to become leaders. “Poetry is powerful because it requires deep creative reflection. You take everything you've learned in the outside world, that you’ve learned in community, that you've learned by observation or by conversation and then to write a poem, you have to sit with yourself. And that poem can introduce you to a thought you didn't even know you had,” she says. “And then bringing that poem to open air completes the process. That's my favorite thing about performance poetry — the reflection it takes to create it and the bravery it takes to share it.”
