Gabriella ’24 Shines in Slam Poetry Competition
Gabriella Lipstich ’24 recently participated in Write Here, Write Now, Speak Loud, a youth spoken word festival in Boston run by the organization Mass Poetry. She participated in both the individual and team competitions. Her team garnered first place in round one, earning them a spot in the finals with four other teams, and a third place finish overall. On the individual side, Gabrielle performed in the preliminary Boston Regional bout in April, and won, making her one of 15 poets, aged 13 to 19, invited to participate in the Massachusetts finals, which took place on May 5. Deemed one of the top six performers in her bracket, Gabriella will now move on to compete in the Brave New Voices teen poetry slam festival, set to take place in Washington, DC, in July, alongside fellow poets from around the world.
“I'll be meeting regularly with the other team members and our coaches, who have lots of experience in both slamming and mentoring young poets,” Gabriella shares. “I'm very excited!”
According to Gabriella, a poetry slam is a competition where participants perform a short original poem in front of an audience and judges. The judges score each poem on a scale from 0-10, including single decimal points. The highest and lowest scores are dropped, and then the middle three are added together to get the total score for each poem. Judges make score decisions based on both the poem itself and the delivery of it. There are usually multiple rounds in which poets perform different pieces than they did in previous rounds.
We hope you will join us in congratulating Gabriella on this incredible accomplishment, and wishing her well at Brave New Voices in July!
CSW—a gender-inclusive day and boarding school for grades 9-12—is a national leader in progressive education. We live out our values of inquiry-based learning, student agency, and embracing diverse perspectives in every aspect of our student experience. Young people come to CSW to learn how to learn and then put what they learn into action—essential skills they carry into their futures as doers, makers, innovators, leaders, and exceptional humans who do meaningful work in the world.