National Youth Poet Laureate program
Celebrating Youth at Intersection of Artistic Excellence & Civic Engagement.
FOUNDED BY
2026-2027 NATIONAL YOUTH POET LAUREATE
daniel umemezie
After months of judging hundreds of Youth Poets Laureate from a network of more than 120 sites, Daniel Somtochukwu Umemezie, of Cedar Falls, Iowa, was named the 10th National Youth Poet Laureate.
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“During my tenure as National Youth Poet Laureate, I want to champion work that refuses to make itself legible on anyone else’s terms: multilingual poetry, diasporic poetry, poetry as a form of political insistence, and poetry as self, because I believe that when a young writer chooses to inhabit the fiery tension between who they are and how they express that identity, they embody art itself.”
—Daniel Umemezie
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Our Program
The National Youth Poet Laureate program works with local youth literary arts organizations across the united states to identify and celebrate exceptional youth poets who use their voice to inspire change.
Our program model supports local literary partners in launching their local youth poet laureate program, elevating these young poet-activists, and creating opportunities and resources to expand and elevate platforms for these youth poet laureates.
This program is championed by leading national literary and arts organizations such as the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Parks Service, Cave Canem, and many more.
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