Seattle Arts & Lectures Interview Transcript: Matt Gano & Aaron Counts, Co-Founders of Seattle Youth Poet Laureate Program Interviewer: Gabriela Denise Frank Date: Thursday, July 30, 2020 Note: this transcript has been edited for clarity and flow. Gabriela Denise Frank I’m Gabriela Denise Frank, and I’m here on behalf of Seattle Arts & Lectures with Matt Gano and Aaron Counts, Seattle poets and co-founders of the Seattle Youth Poet Laureate (YPL) program. Thank you for being here with me this afternoon. Aaron Counts Hey, thanks for having us. GDF Yeah, I’m really excited to talk to with you. I just met Bitaniya Giday who is the current Youth Poet Laureate for 2020 and 2021. We had a wonderful conversation a few weeks ago. Matt Gano Fantastic. GDF So, to set the stage, tell me how this program began. What is it, and how did you come to start it? MG So, here’s what happened. We were at a poetry reading for Roberto Ascalon at the Massive Monkees Studio. Roberto had a feature of a series of poems that he was working on, and he had a feature set up there, and a mutual friend of ours, Christa Bell—who’s also a phenomenal poet and playwright and all-around incredible artist—approached me and mentioned that Michael Cirelli, who was one of the founders of Urban Word—which is the New York Youth Speaks chapter—was starting a Youth Poet Laureate program across the country and looking for pilot cities to start this program to partner with Urban Word. I don’t know exactly who was using Urban Word as a framework for the YPL, but he was looking for partner cities, satellite cities, and Aaron and I were both at the party. Christa mentioned this to me on the side, and I was, like, “Yeah, we should do that.” Aaron was walking by and I was, like, “AC, we should do this,” and he was, like, “Yeah, sounds good!” So that was pretty much the seed that was planted. Aaron and I both had connections with Michael Cirelli from Youth Speaks. Aaron was one of the founders of the Youth Speaks Seattle chapter back in the early 2000s, and I hopped on in 2004, I believe, which was a year or two after they started Youth Speaks Seattle. So we were early mentors and, you know, program directors and founders of Youth Speaks, and we had that connection with Michael Cirelli from New York through Brave New Voices, the national youth poetry slam gatherings. So, Christa put us in touch with Mike, and we just kind of started from there. SAL Interview Transcript - Matt Gano & Aaron Counts | 1 He let us know kind of what his vision was and what they were hoping to be able to do. Aaron and I, you know, part of the task was finding an umbrella organization. It was something way beyond what we can do ourselves, so we reached out to a couple different arts organizations in the city, people that we knew, we both worked for many of them in the city, and then eventually landed with Writers in the Schools (WITS). Jeanine Walker was the director at the time, and a good friend of both of ours. Those cohorts get pretty tight after a while—you work with the same teaching artists in the same circles for a really long time. Jeanine was in a position to lobby for us to Ruth and talk up the program, and it seemed like a really natural and amazing fit for Seattle Arts & Lectures to take on the Youth Poet Laureate program. That’s basically the origin story. We can go into more the details from there, but that’s how it really started. Aaron, do you have any other...? AC Yeah, I mean, the network of organizations that converge at Brave New Voices each year, you know, we saw how that event lifted up the spoken-word artists, teenage spoken-word artists, and we were looking for a way to highlight and showcase and amplify those page-based poets in the same way. And, so, it was just a great idea, and it fit right in line with what Writers in the Schools is trying to do. I think it was the right move at the right time. GDF That was about seven years ago, or so? AC This is our seventh. Yeah. This is our seventh Laureate, so yeah. That seems so long ago now. MG That’s crazy. It’s been seven years. It does not feel that long. GDF And you’ve handed over leadership, is that right? This year? AC Yeah. We never intended to be the perpetual mentors of the Laureate. There are so many great teaching artists and writers in the city, and so we wanted to share the wealth and what other voices get to help bring to the program and how to lift up the manuscripts of the winner into this amazing book. It’s a little bittersweet, but I think it was the right move. GDF Yeah. I have questions about where the program started and if it’s the same today. When someone joins the cohort, what does the program look like? It runs for about a year, starting in the fall, then concluding in the spring or early summer. What does the cohort do together? AC SAL Interview Transcript - Matt Gano & Aaron Counts | 2 Yeah, so, usually the applications for YPL come out in March and April, around Poetry Month, with the idea that the panel will deliberate, choose the winner, and that winner is usually announced at Northwest Folklife Festival over Memorial Day weekend. The first year of the program, we didn’t have an idea that it would be a winner and a cohort, but seeing the finalists and the strength of all those applications and the multitude of voices, it felt like the right thing to do to try to not only support the winner, but also extend the reach of the program and the voices of the young people. Every year, it’s about eight finalists—the YPL winner, an ambassador or two which also take on some speaking and teaching duties around the city, and then the cohort of finalists, trying to build a community, so they can support each other beyond the one-year term of the program. MG Yeah, just to mention, too, when we started, there was no plan, like Aaron said, for a cohort or an ambassador. Part of our ability to do that [came from the] freedom [we were given] within the structure to create this program the way that we wanted to. So, actually, the New York version of Youth Poet Laureate is much different than what we’re doing. Different cities have different focuses, like some of the winners are chosen actually live, in-person, sort of in poetry slam style, but most of the decisions we made for this program were based around the content of the writing itself and to promote the voices of writers who were not necessarily in the spoken word realm, because we felt, like, Youth Speaks was handling that realm strongly already. Having that freedom, we structured our contest to be judged by a panel, and then the winners will be announced live, in-person at Folk Life. But we weren’t giving them the heads-up that they’d won. It was more about having the winner pre-determined so that the reading at Folk Life wasn’t a contest in itself, it’s more of a celebration of the artwork. So that’s an interesting thing to note. We both felt that was a pretty cool setup that we were able to change things how we wanted them to be. I think it’s one of the things that’s allowed for this program to feel at home in Seattle and feel like it’s doing the work that this community needs for it to do in its little niche. AC That process also allows such a deep discussion of the applicants and their writing, as opposed to, you know, we have half a minute or so after a performance to give it a score. We spend hours and hours reading applications and the panel sits and debates and just talks about all the great things going on. Sometimes it’s very difficult decision, but I would not want to make that on the fly at a live event. GDF No, no. I can imagine. So, this is open to anyone who lives in the greater Seattle area? MG It is. The catch is that they have to be able to attend events in the city and in the area. So it’s actually technically open to anyone. We’ve kind of expanded it to be outside of the city limits as well. We’ve had a few people from Bellingham apply, but one of the requirements is that the Youth Poet Laureate be present at events and be able to maintain that title in person within the city and surrounding areas. So, yeah. SAL Interview Transcript - Matt Gano & Aaron Counts | 3 AC Yes, a lot of speaking requests, most of them happen in the city or just outside the city. I think Wei-Wei [Lee, the 2019/2020 Youth Poet Laureate] did a reading that opened up one of Mayor Durkin’s press conferences a few months ago, you know, things like that. Those events usually happen in the city.