For Colored Girls Who Considered Yaky

For Colored Girls Who Considered Yaky

WBEZ brings you fact-based news and information. Sign up for our newsletters to stay up to date on the stories that matter.

Poet Kush Thompson, 17, is a senior at Orr Academy High School, but she was representing YOUmedia Chicago in this year’s competition.  This is her third year participating in Louder Than a Bomb. (Kush can also be heard performing here.) For Colored Girls Who Considered Yaky is “a declaration of black beauty in definance to any practice that asks us to be anything but what we are.”

Though everyone knows “the points are not the point, the point is the poetry” – congratulations to Kush, who successfully advanced to the Final round of competition, one of the top 13 individual poets in the 2012 Festival, out of a field of over 800 young writers.

The largest of its kind in the world, Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB) is Chicago’s rapidly-growing teen poetry festival, taking place February 18 - March 10, 2012, at various venues around Chicago. Aiming to bring teens together across racial, gang, and socio-economic lines, LTAB is a friendly competition that emphasizes self-expression and community via poetry, oral story-telling, and hip-hop spoken word.

Click here to hear all the other 2012 recordings, alongside nearly 200 Louder Than a Bomb Finalist pieces recorded by Chicago Public Media (WBEZ-Chicago) over the past eight years.