Become St. Louis's 2025-2026 Youth Poet Laureate
Pen Power Poetry is bringing back the Youth Poet Laureate program to St. Louis after four years of the city not having an active laureate.
​
Are you a passionate young poet ready to make your voice heard? We're excited to announce the search for St. Louis’s 2025–2026 Youth Poet Laureate! This prestigious title is awarded to a local poet (ages 13–19) who demonstrates artistic excellence, civic engagement, and a commitment to social change through poetry and performance. The St. Louis Youth Poet Laureate will serve as a literary ambassador for the city, sharing original work at public events, leading youth workshops, and using poetry to spark dialogue and change. This is a unique opportunity to be mentored, published, and heard, while helping shape the future of arts and activism in St. Louis.
​
To apply, please fill out this Google Form by September 15.
​
In addition to local opportunities, the winner will also be eligible to apply for the National Youth Poet Laureate title, an honor whose alumni include Amanda Gorman. This is a chance to represent your city, raise your voice, and join a growing movement of youth poets making a difference.
Mary Jo Bang
Pacia Elaine Anderson
This year's competition judges are Mary Jo Bang and Pacia Elaine Anderson, extroadinary poets and contributors to the St. Louis community.
​
Mary Jo Bang is the author of nine books of poems—including A Film in Which I Play Everyone, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, a PEN Voelcker Award, and the Heartland Booksellers Award, A Doll for Throwing, and Elegy which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s published translations of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. Paradiso is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2025. She is also the translator of Colonies of Paradise: Poems by Matthias Göritz, and co-translator, with Yuki Tanaka, of A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi—forthcoming from Princeton University Press in November 2024. She has a BA and MA in Sociology from Northwestern University, a BA in Photography from the Polytechnic of Central London (now Westminster University), and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.​​
​
Pacia Elaine Anderson is currently the adult St. Louis Poet Laureate. She has always had a fascination with words. As a child, she would spend hours writing, speaking, reading, and drawing as an early meditative practice that would serve as a precursor to her creative work as an adult; one which draws from the artistry inherent in language to connect, document, to make sense of the world around her, and to tell a good story. Pacia Elaine's poetic work is a charismatic blend of rhyme, layered imagery, and fantasy, all of which are used to explore a diversity of subject matter and co-create visceral, emotive experiences for readers and listeners alike. Pacia's visual work serves as a conduit for moving us to contemplation, and for channeling infinite possibilities of reshaping ideas, color, space, line, and the imagination to both remind and affirm the connectedness of and divinity in us all. The written, spoken, visual, and teaching Word Artist’s professional work meets at the intersection of arts-learning and community development, with a focus on youth development and the reclamation of the cultural practices, traditions, and customs of the African Diaspora.