News Releases

Brave New Voices: A Benefit Performance

For Release Upon Receipt - June 27, 2008

St. Augustine


Arts-in-Action (AiA), the Applied Creative Arts Unit of the Department of Creative & Festival Arts (DCFA), The University of the West Indies (UWI), in collaboration with Reflections of Our Oral TraditionS (ROOTS), a non government organization that has embarked upon a public literacy programme for at-risk youth, will host a concert celebrating local youth. Titled ‘Brave New Voices: A Benefit Performance’, the concert will take place at JFK Lecture Theatre, UWI St Augustine on Sunday 6th July 2008 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. Tickets cost $100.

The benefit concert will showcase the talent of the country’s leading poets, and is meant to aid six young poets who will travel to Washington DC to represent Trinidad and Tobago at the world-renowned International Youth Poetry Slam Festival ‘Brave New Voices’, to be held from Tuesday 15th to Saturday 19th July, 2008. The International Slam Festival will bring together a generation of young artists, educators, poets, and mentors in Washington DC to participate in this event as it gathers, educates and showcases talented, dedicated and courageous young writers.

Now in its eleventh year, ‘Brave New Voices’ 2008 continues to create a forum and community among an ever-growing number of youth who are returning to literature and reinvesting in education through the power of the spoken word. Building bridges across radically diverse ethnic, racial and socio-economic lines, Brave New Voices is for a generation of young people speaking for themselves, a generation documenting their days in journals, reciting struggles and successes on open microphones, teenagers transcending traditional stereotypes by speaking their truths and listening to the truths of others. Up to 500 young poets from across America and the globe will take part in this one-of-a-kind event.

 

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