On a rainy Saturday afternoon at Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse in late April, bustling with people eating, working, and socializing, Marcellus Vinson is talking about prescription drugs and prisons to a rapt audience.
As Vinson closes the poem to a raucous applause, a woman from the audience, moved to tears, runs to embrace him. She shakes his hand, hugs him again tightly, before rushing out the door. His peers dap him up and cheer him on.
Just two days earlier, Vinson was named the 2026 Baltimore youth poet laureate, though the news wouldn’t be publicly shared for more than a month. In this first performance since he learned the news, he glows with that private knowledge.
Vinson won the award in his first year of entering the competition, hosted by DewMore Baltimore and the city, and five years into his poetry writing career. Last spring, he graduated from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and also received his associate’s degree in arts and sciences from Baltimore City Community College, a testament to the rigor he brings to his writing.
“You want to keep people engaged with what you’re saying. You get to introduce these different devices in your writing to keep people engaged, but you’re also telling a message at the same time,” Vinson said.
Since the first competition in 2015, The Baltimore Youth Poet Laureate program has been a platform to uplift youth voices from the city through poetry, connecting them to city officials and other community leaders as a voice of the city.
“We already had programming where young people was going out into the community and performing, both locally and nationally,” said Kenneth Morrison, founder of DewMore Baltimore. Founded in 2012, DewMore Baltimore is an organization dedicated to advancing social justice and youth empowerment through poetry. “The real passion and genius of the program was having it at City Hall and inviting community leaders and elected officials. Folks who are creating change and leading change in the city need to hear from these young people.”
Alongside the recognition and a cash prize, the youth poet laureate gets a one-year term as an official voice at conferences and community events, publishes a book, and goes on a book tour at the various Enoch Pratt Free Library branches across the city. Runners-up get the opportunity to work alongside the youth poet laureate as ambassadors, accompanying them to different readings and speaking engagements.
It’s not unusual for the runner-up ambassadors to toss their hat into the ring again for a chance at the title. Jay’Den Addison, a current Towson University student and youth poet laureate in 2025, and Hannah Sawyerr, the second youth poet laureate, were ambassadors before winning their own title.
In the decade since her term as laureate, Sawyerr has written two young adult verse novels and is currently collaborating on a middle school book.
“The Youth Poet Laureate program showed me I have a voice,” she said. “It was a gift to me because at that time I was feeling very voiceless.”
Much of her work centers around sharing her experience as a survivor of sexual assault and advocating for other survivors. The collection she published as youth poet laureate, “For Girls Growing into Their Hips,” details her coming into womanhood and navigating her changing body, sexuality, and agency. The 28 poems in the book play with format and structure, a technique she has continued with her published verse novels. “Patriarchal Dictionary” is a feminist vocabulary lesson while “Multiple Choice” is structured as a multiple choice test. The former takes words people use to describe women — “bitch,” “hoe,” “lady,” and more — and defines them based on how they’re used against women. The latter is a callout of colorism, using five questions with two rhetorical answer choices each.
“I can’t imagine not thinking about poetry,” says Sawyerr. “Poetry feels like such an ordinary part of my life now. It feels so deeply integrated into what I do. I can’t imagine not thinking about it. You wake up today and you’re going to drink a glass of water. I wake up and I’m gonna have poetry on my mind at some point in the day. It always returns to poetry.”
The community of Youth Poet Laureate winners and ambassadors is small and tight-knit — Sawyerr is also editing Addison’s in-progress book.
Like his predecessors, Addison uses his work to speak to the times. One of his poems, “ICE is Approaching,” captured the moment this past winter as the historic storm of snow and ice hit here in Baltimore and the violence and misconduct by masked ICE agents reached a fever pitch.
At its core, the Youth Poet Laureate Competition is an opportunity for young people to navigate how they want to use their voice.
“Baltimore is a very social justice oriented city, so most of the poems we heard [during the 2015 competition] were social justice oriented,” says Joy Anjelica, who served as ambassador during Sawyerr’s tenure. The two co-founded a poetry organization on Morgan State University’s campus just a year prior to competing.
“I think the program definitely empowers you to speak the truth, especially about your experience being in Baltimore or from Baltimore.”
“I think the program definitely empowers you to speak the truth, especially about your experience being in Baltimore or from Baltimore.”
Joy Anjelica, Youth Poet Laureate ambassador
In 2017, when Youth Poet Laureate Mohamed Tall performed a poem criticizing then-Mayor Catherine Pugh’s reversal on the city minimum wage at the competition with her in attendance, it turned heads.
If Tall’s words are written with such tenacity and force, then his performance added yet another dimension. The nature of spoken word and slam call for some level of performance given the need for oratory skill, memorization, audience awareness, poise, and more. Tall’s tongue is precise and his words enunciated.
“I’m not gonna change my poem because I’m afraid of the reaction it might get,” he says now about that moment. “If anything, I’m gonna go harder in this poem to where you can’t deny it. To where it’s undeniable.”
“I’m not gonna change my poem because I’m afraid of the reaction it might get,” former Youth Poet Laureate Mohamed Tall says now. “If anything, I’m gonna go harder in this poem to where you can’t deny it. To where it’s undeniable.”
His youth poet laureate book, “Too Broke To Die” solidified his critique and condemnation of the system in print.
“Poetry empowered me in a way that sports and entertainment couldn’t,” he said. “It helped me establish confidence in my voice in a way in which my perspective was being centered, and it meant something.”
Even with the competitive side, there’s still kinship amongst the competitors Joy shares. She speaks with a level of respect for the peers she competed with years ago.
“It was an honor working with those guys for sure because everyone’s style was so different and everyone had different strengths — literary strengths and performance strengths.”
And the strength of the competition is that these voices come from different corners of the city. Derick Ebert, the inaugural youth poet laureate, had only become interested in poetry a few months prior to his win when he came across a Javon Johnson poem performance on Youtube. He was immediately hooked, and began jotting down bars and notes on his phone.
He had been a debater in middle and high school and had prior experience orating and making arguments, but poetry allowed him another mechanism to express and speak his truth. It also gave him a tool for emotional regulation, which he sorely needed when he came across the Johnson video following a breakup.
But it wasn’t just about the message he delivered in his poem that landed Ebert the laurels. “I think Derick made it cool to study craft,” Anjelica says. “You could tell he really did study how to write and that he was passionate about the writing, not just the performance.”
For Morrison, the founder of DewMore, the North Star of the competition is putting young people in positions of power. “It’s like, okay, this is your platform, what you’re passionate about. Let’s make sure you have access to the rooms and to the people who need to hear it,” he said.
“The platform should really be creating pathways for young people to be able to tell their story and see how it’s impacting change in our communities,” says Morrison. “It’s not just about getting paid gigs. How do we ensure that these voices are not just this one time in City Hall, but ensure it’s happening any time?”
These pathways are important no matter where life takes the Youth Poet Laureate winners afterward, with some continuing to pursue a poetry career and others going into music, teaching, or other fields.
Lady Brion, executive director of the Black Arts District and the first spoken word artist to be Maryland’s poet laureate, hopes to see even more investment in young poets and writers.
“I was able to be on this journey because there were so many other adult poets who created a pathway, who forged a way for me to be able to participate in this art form,” she said. “They created the spaces to share our work, to be a part of competitions and to be developed. Having folks pour into me, I see the same thing happening with DewMore Baltimore and the youth poet laureate.”