Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Launches New Prize Awarding $10,000 in Contest and Scholarship Money for Youth Poets of Color
(VENICE, Calif.) — NEWS: Beyond Baroque, one of the nation’s leading literary arts centers, has announced that the Amanda Gorman Future Voices Poetry Prize is now actively accepting applications. The prize, created in honor of Beyond Baroque alumna and U.S. Presidential Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman, will accept applications until May 1, 2022.
“We’re very excited to start receiving submissions from young poets of color, and for the opportunity to foster their growth as artists,” said the nonprofit’s executive director, Quentin Ring.
“The Amanda Gorman Poetry Prize is an important opportunity for young poets of color to be recognized for their poetic talent,” added Shonda Buchanan, President of Beyond Baroque’s Board of Trustees. “We hope it will inspire them to follow Amanda’s lead in creating a legacy in which poetry and social justice work combine to infuse America with a richer human agency.”
The Amanda Gorman Future Voices Poetry Prize will award scholarships to college-bound student poets of color. As a special feature of the debut of the fund, there is a poetry contest for 9th, 10th and 11th graders, the same age at which Gorman began her development as a poet in the Beyond Baroque Student Poets’ program. All told, $10,000 in scholarship and contest money will be awarded in 2022.
The prize continues Beyond Baroque’s long history of nurturing some of Los Angeles’ most prominent poets, including Wanda Coleman, Amy Gerstler, and Amanda Gorman herself. Gorman describes Beyond Baroque as the place “where a young poet found the love of her life” and shared more about her history with Beyond Baroque on the recent ABC 20/20 Special Amanda Gorman: Brave Enough with Robin Roberts.
The Future Voices Poetry Scholarship is open for all poets currently enrolled in grades 9-12 in California, and who self-identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color. College-bound students in 12th grade can apply for a scholarship award, and 9th, 10th and 11th grade can submit to the poetry contest. Prize winners will be announced by July 1, 2022.
For more information and to apply, please visit https://www.beyondbaroque.org/.
ABOUT BEYOND BAROQUE
Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center is one of the nation’s most successful and influential grassroots incubators of the literary arts. Founded in 1968, and housed in the original Venice City Hall building in Venice, California, it is a nonprofit public space dedicated to cultivating new writing and expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature, and art through cultural events and community interaction. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming, including readings, workshops, art exhibits, and education. Across five decades, Beyond Baroque has provided crucial support to a series of seminal writers, artists, and musicians that include Wanda Coleman, Dennis Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Exene Cervenka, John Doe, Mike Kelley, Viggo Morternsen, Will Alexander, and Amanda Gorman. Today the Center continues to provide a vital cultural forum through its free workshops, reading series, and general programming.
ABOUT AMANDA GORMAN
Amanda Gorman is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, as well as an award-winning writer and cum laude graduate of Harvard University, where she studied sociology. Born and raised in Los Angeles, she is the author of the “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country” (Viking Books for Young Readers, March 2021), the poetry collection “Call Us What We Carry” (Viking, December 2021) and “The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough” (Penmanship Books, 2015). In 2017, Gorman was named the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States after previously serving as the first-ever youth poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is the founder and executive director of One Pen One Page, an organization providing free creative writing programs for underserved youth, and serves the Write Change program in her role as International Changemaker for Estee Lauder.
Related link: https://www.beyondbaroque.org/
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