New Orleans Youth Poetry Festival 2023

Join us for the return of the New Orleans Youth Poetry Festival (NOYPF) taking place April 14th & 15th, 2023!

The NOYPF is a two day youth storytelling festival that highlights the next generation of spoken word artists, poets, rappers and literary-based performers from and in New Orleans.

Join us at the Ashé Powerhouse Theater for a youth slam, a performance by NOYPF 2023 featured poet Gabriel Ramirez, and a series of workshops.

See below for our full schedule of events. Register for the youth slam and workshops early, limited space is available.

Come see 12 youth poets in the city battle it out for hundreds of dollars in prizes and the title of New Orleans Youth Grand Slam Champion! Are you a youth poet looking to join the slam? Register HERE.

Afterparty/youth mixer hosted by DJ HellNah

A catalyst to choosing oneself through difficult times and practicing the importance of our truth, “I Am Here: Affirmation as a form of Resistance” is a workshop where participants can speak back to what has made us feel small, invisible, and impossible throughout our lives. This workshop encourages participants to reclaim their bodies and histories. Whether it is a bully from childhood, someone who told you that you can’t, or a country with systems that have shown they don't care whether you are alive, it’s time to denounce the false truths others have given us about who we are and our worth. Workshop space is limited, register .

Although we occupy the same planet, there are many many worlds within it. It can be argued that each of us is a world into our own. Global catastrophes like COVID 19 tend to make people focus on the negative aspects of the world endings forgetting that some worlds should end or should never have existed in the first place. As Arundati Roy said - this pandemic is a portal. This begs the question, a portal to what? What roles do artists play in world building? What worlds dare we imagine through our words that we have previously named impossible? Rooted in the belief that “Words Create Worlds”, this workshop will ask participants to engage in radical imagination and ideation as we write poems about the world(s) we want to exist in and be. Workshop space is limited, register .

About Gabriel Ramirez:

Gabriel Ramirez is a Queer Afro-Latinx poet, activist, and teaching artist. Gabriel has received fellowships from The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, CantoMundo, Miami Book Fair, and a participant in the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop. Gabriel has performed on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre, United Nations, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theatre, and other venues & universities around the nation. Gabriel’s electrifying writing and performance are catalysts towards healing and brings awareness to mental health, Afro-Latinidad, the African Diaspora, self love, masculinity, and social change. Understanding how poetry changed his life as a teenager, Gabriel is dedicated to working with young people and poets ranging from middle schoolers to adults inspiring them to cultivate their voices as writers and performers via writing workshops, performance coaching, and performances. Gabriel has also received admiration from institutions of higher education and the underserved communities he works in. Gabriel was featured in Huffington Post, VIBE Magazine, Blavity, Upworthy, The Flama, and Remezcla. You can find his work in various spaces, including Youtube, and in publications like The Volta, Split This Rock, The Acentos Review, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, VINYL, and in Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books 2017), What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press 2019) and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press 2020). Follow Gabriel @RamirezPoet and RamirezPoet.com.

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