Miami-Dade County's commitment to celebrating poetry is not bound to just National Poetry Month in April.
This fall, the county, in partnership with the Miami-Dade County Library System, is challenging young adults to engage with the art form through its first “Poetry Contest for Teens.”
“ I just want to make poetry accessible and available to people of all ages because it's such an important part of my life, and it was such a formative part of my experience,” said Nicole Tallman, who is spearheading the initiative as this year’s Miami-Dade County poet laureate.
In celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, teens are tasked with writing a sonnet, or 14-line poem, about what freedom means to them. While traditional sonnets are typically written in iambic pentameter — a rhythmic structure introduced by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer — the poem does not have to follow a specific rhyme scheme or meter.
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“ I thought, what a beautiful way for us to write poems in celebration of our community, of our country, our freedom and how we see that,” Tallman said.
Participants must be between the ages of 13 to 18 years old and they must own a library card in order to enter. Teens have until Oct. 17 to submit their piece. Those looking for more instruction can also take part in some of the free workshops being offered in conjunction with the contest.
She hopes that this contest will help jumpstart more opportunities to expose more people to poetry and build upon the work already done by existing organizations including O, Miami and the Miami Book Fair.
Tallman believes that poetry is an ideal vehicle of expression for young people.
“[Poetry] forces a person to better understand the world around them, and to vocalize that, right? I think poets are mostly observers," she said.
"We're all here on this earth during a specific period of time, and this is my way of recording the human experience around me. And maybe somebody encounters it many years later and says, ‘Wow, that's what it was to be alive during that moment.’”
The poems will be judged by a panel that includes Tallman and former fellow poets Caridad Moro-Gronlier and Richard Blanco. The top three winners will each receive gift cards from Books & Books.
Tallman, who is a published poet and a senior advisor in the Office of the Mayor, is the third poet laureate to be appointed since she helped the county establish the program back in 2022. Each poet laureate helms a signature project that elevates poetry in the community. Tallman said that she plans to handover the poet laureate program to the Miami-Dade County Library System with the intent of creating a committee to select the next poet laureate, instead of making it a an appointed position.
“I think that a lot of laureate programs have traditionally been housed in library systems, and libraries are just a natural door to learning and literacy and language,” Tallman said. “We are a community that has legs and gravitas, and we care about literature, and we care about the arts, and we're not just we're not just saying it, we're showing it.”
