Brave New Voices

It was a national thing, and they still do it to this day.

Brave New Voices took it over, I want to say, the year after I was in there.

This was 2001.

And out of 32 teams, we came in sixth place.

That was the gold medal.

Brave New Voice is still going on.

It just happened.

Simultaneously, there's an adult poetry scene that Russell Simmons and, uh, Kamilah Forbes, and all these sort of producers had discovered in LA, um, with, uh, Dante Bosco and Xian and Poetry and these guys at the Poetry Lounge.

So yeah, he mentioned two different nonprofits.

He mentioned Youth Speaks, which is the nonprofit that teaches kids how to do spoken word.

And they have camps and after school programs and they have Brave New Voices and they have competitions.

And that's what launched Raph into the world.

She came up through the youth scene a few years before I did.

based out of Chicago, so she did Brave New Voices.

She was on slam teams and stuff like that.

You know, the most beautiful artists make incredible poetry, but also have the skill to just put it to music, and I think some of us wish that we could do that.