Beibee’s Ben…poetry. prose. diaries.

Internationally-acclaimed spoken word artist Taalam Acey will perform as a special guest at New Orleans Youth Slam poetry finals tomorrow night. The teen 2009 finalists compete for a chance join other poets this summer at YouthSpeak’s Brave New Voices Festival, the spoken word competition upon which Russell Simmons’s, Brave New Voices HBO show is based.

The final NOYS poetry slam beings at 6:00 PM, tomorrow night, April 15, at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, NOLA, 1712 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd, New Orleans, Louisiana 70113. Cost: $5.00. Call (504) 569-9070 for more information or visit the center’s website here.

The website address for NOYS is wordplayno.org, where you can view the list of NOLA/NOYS finalists.

From a news release posted at Arts, Social Justice, & Recovery:”

The Finale will be hosted by Hollywood, welcoming DJ Raj Smoove, an all-star panel of judges, performances by members of the 2008 NOYS team, and a special performance by world renowned Taalam Acey. The Finale is also a fundraiser to support NOYS in their endeavors, including travel to the national poetry competition in Chicago, Brave New Voices.

You may have seen ads for Russell Simmons’s HBO show Brave New Voices. The site describes the project this way:

All over the United States, a new generation of poets is emerging. This new HBO series captures teenagers picking up the pen and taking hold of the microphone with passion, intelligence, creativity, honesty and power. These voices of 21st Century America transcend race, class, gender, orientation, and red state/blue state politics as they show us all what the next generation of leaders looks and sounds like.

Brave New Voices is a new seven-part series that features teenage poets and their mentors from San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, Santa Fe, Ft. Lauderdale, Honolulu and Ann Arbor as they prepare for Youth Speaks’ 2008 Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Finals.

Queen Latifah narrates the Brave New Voices film segments on HBO. 

After reading more about the show at Bossip, I gather that what you’ll see on HBO is the 2008 national competition. BNV airs Sundays at 10:00 PM CST, but you can watch clips here.

If you’ve never seen a live poetry slam, then catch tomorrow night’s NOLA finals. However, Taalam Acey is a professional poet and worth seeing all by himself.

Acey also has a blog called, Taalam Acey Until 6am or Whenever You Leave where you can watch clips of him performing. Here’s the poet reciting his poem “She Conjurez,” a love poem. In it he says his lover is “like New Orleans, constantly calling me back” and you haven’t seen him alive until you’ve seen him with her: