Education & Youth | Poetry & Spoken Word | Arts & Culture | The Word
Photos provided by Brave New Voices and festival photographers, Kalei des Scope and Gianpaolo Pabros.
Lincey Violette, Jayden Barrett, Shawn Douglas, and Journey Rosa looked out over the crowd. Violette, Barrett, and Rosa stood with their hands behind their back. Douglas slowly raised his right arm. In a quick motion, he closed it into a fist. It was a signal: the poets launched into action.
“The pen is power,” they said in unison, their words reverberating across the auditorium. They detailed the Black stereotypes, forced sterilization, and the prison industrial complex. Then they kept going.
The four are members of Connecticut youth poetry slam team Ink Theory, which made statewide history this summer as slam champions at the 29th Annual Brave New Voices Festival, the largest international youth poetry festival.
After a riveting send-off during the Dixwell Avenue Q-House in early July and a win later that month, the team has come home to share its victory and cement the Elm City as the cultural capital of Connecticut.
The team is composed of five members: Violette, a freshman at New York University; Barrett, a recent graduate of Common Ground High School and freshman at Albertus Magnus College; Douglas, a sophomore at the University of Connecticut; Rosa, a junior at the Sounds School; and Lucky Francis, a 2025 graduate from Achievement First Amistad High School.
This year, the event took place in San Francisco, where 14 teams from across the country competed for the coveted title of 2026 Brave New Voices (BNV) Slam Champions. The event had 2,000 attendees and featured 300 poets.
During the four-day slam, participants got the chance to participate in writing workshops, attend lectures, and hear guest speakers. This year’s slam finals, which lasted for over three hours and can be viewed here, took place at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco.
“What this win signifies for Connecticut is that maybe it will prompt more kids to want to participate [in poetry],” said New Haven Poet Laureate Yexandra “Yex” Diaz, in a recent phone call. “And we hope to see a larger turnout for the next qualifier [for Ink Theory].”
Diaz also serves as artistic director of The Word, a literary arts program that serves high school students and above which manages the youth slam team.
Since 2025, Diaz has coached Ink Theory alongside teaching artist, educator, and former artistic director of The Word Tarishi “Midnight” Shuler. The pair are also members of the state poetry slam team Verbal Slap, which recently won first place at the Chicharra Poetry Slam Festival this spring and took fourth at the Southern Fried Slam in Orlando earlier this summer.
The days were long and fast-paced, with the competition running from 8 am to 8 p.m., Diaz said. She added that the hours of intellectual labor and team practice reached even farther back: members of Ink Theory emerged from a qualifying slam in New Haven earlier this year. The team also lost, and then gained, new members after a few students dropped out during a busy college prep and internship season.
While students had three months to produce poems, members of the team only had three weeks to practice and choreograph before BNV. Rehearsals consisted of two-hour sessions twice a week. In comparison, other teams may have had six months to a year to practice, Diaz said.
Then there were challenges that arose at Brave New Voices, where the team placed second last year. During prelims—that’s preliminary matches—Ink Theory competed in two bouts that only featured three teams, as opposed to the normal four. After tying with Bay-area based team BeSpoke, it looked like Ink Theory might not make it to the finals.
And then, members of both teams did something that rarely happens in the world of competitive slam poetry: they talked it through and found a solution that felt more fair to everyone in the room. This year, five teams—rather than the four that slam organizers had allotted for—made it to finals.
“It really was unprecedented what happened in that room, you know,” Diaz said. “To have all of the teams, even our own competitors and vote for a fifth [team] to be accommodated and then to have five accommodated, even that has never happened.”
For Violette, who was competing in a large-scale slam for the first time, there was no word more fitting to encapsulate the event than “grateful.” She described the competition as a “giving experience.”
“I feel like I am changed just from seeing other poets and their styles, and the way that they perform, and their writing is definitely going to have an impact on the way I move forward when it comes to my writing.”
Violette also noted the power of hearing speakers like LA-based poet and activist aja monet, Brooklyn-based R&B singer Serpent with Feet, and Grammy-nominated poet and lead singer of Tank and The Bangas Tarriona "Tank" Ball.
She described the experience as forging not just professional connections, but having a chance to absorb new writing techniques, and learning to support and be supported by her teammates. After hearing monet speak, she also learned that “there has to be action to my writing.”
“As a poet, I have more of an obligation to not just write, but to then put action to my words, to go out there, and to try to make change that goes beyond just my writing,” she said in a recent phone call.
She added that—while her nerves never go away—her favorite moment outside of winning was the team’s first match, during which “the energy that was, like, in that whole room was insane.”
Despite majoring in psychology and being on the premed track, Violette added that writing will still coincide with her studies, saying that also looking at other art endeavors such as SLAM! at NYU the university’s official student led poetry slam team.
Like Violette, Francis was also coming down from that competition high.
“No words can really describe how I’m feeling,” Francis said, in a phone call after the group’s big win. “I’m shocked, I’m overwhelmed. We went through a lot of great challenges and tribulations to get on that final stage. In the end, us winning … it was just incredible.”
While performing has its own mental hurdles, Francis said that stepping on stage together allowed the team to truly shine. Everything came to the moment and it was now or ever.
“I was so scared. I was so nervous because I have anxiety when it comes to speaking in front of people, but I already knew that like we sat there and we practiced, and practiced, and practiced, and put in hard work to memorize poems,” she said, adding that when they were at the competition, the team only had one day to practice before preliminary matches occurred.
In an alternative universe, Francis wouldn’t have taken up writing. As life got hectic, she took a hiatus from writing for a period of time during school. Then she saw her former creative writing teacher Brianna Martone, and was inspired to pick up the pen.
She started seriously writing at 16 years old and called Martonea big inspiration behind her writing career and foundation.
“She guided me in so much ways that I wouldn’t think was possible … During school I just had a lot going on, so when I met Ms. Martone and I took her class, she gave me an outlet and a way to express myself, to be heard, to put my passion on paper.”
She said that much of her writing comes from raising awareness on matters such as police brutality, sexuality, family trauma, and other topics she discovers on social media. She described her style as “grounded” like an Earthbender, saying that the team internally categorizes writing styles using elemental categories listed in Avatar: The Last Airbender.
When she got the call to compete on Ink Theory, she used it as a chance to challenge herself and the writers around her. From then on, every waking moment was dedicated to writing, thinking about potential topics during the little moments throughout the day. After finishing competition, Francis said that her next goal was to audition for the state team, Verbal Slap.
The win was an emotional moment for all of the members. When Ink Theory made it to the finals, the team was up against four other teams: DewMore Baltimore, based in Baltimore, Maryland; Lowell High School Compass Program Poetry team, based in Lowell, Mass.; and California-based poetry teams Youth Speaks Bay Area and BeSpoke. After competing in the finals, all five members remembered holding hands, lingering in anticipation.
When it became clear they had won, Rosa screamed in disbelief, while Francis, frozen in the moment, could only repeat the words “Oh my God.” She wrapped Rosa in a tight hug and the two fell to the floor still locked in a full embrace. Getting up from the floor, Francis was hyperventilating and Rosa held back tears of joy.
Diaz also thanked the City of New Haven’s Department of Arts Culture and Tourism and the Carolyn Foundation, both funders of The Word, for making the trip financially possible.
Since the competition, Ink Theory hasn’t stopped working. Last month, Ink Theory took fifth place in the NorthBeast Regional Poetry Slam, performed at a Youth Invitational Poetry Slam last Wednesday at the Stetson Library as a part of the weeklong Black Wall Street activities, and was featured in statewide news.
“We are extremely proud for the hard work that the students put in and it brings joy to our hearts to enjoy this moment and the fruits of their labor,” Shuler said.
The next installment of Elm City Flow will be hosted on Friday, September 25th, where Verbal Slap CT Slam Team Qualifiers will take place, alongside a Homecoming performance by Ink Theory from 6 to 8 p.m. at NXTHVN.