This morning I am in Los Angeles to attend the 13th Annual Brave New Voices Festival. I am here with five of Ann Arbor's most outstanding teenage poets to coach them (along with the illustrious Jeff Kass) in the 2010 International Youth Poetry Slam. For the past two months the team members -- Haley Patail, Glenna Benitez, Isaiah Pete-Blakeney, Allison Kennedy, and Alia Persico-Shammas -- have furiously crafted, revised, choreographed and rehearsed their poems for the competition. Now they are here along with 49 other teams from across the country (and elsewhere) to perform their poems in the spotlights of the world's largest youth poetry festival.

The poems our team will be performing here in Los Angeles are stunning. They face up to issues of race and gender in brave and sophisticated ways. They present startling images and evoke haunting metaphors. The depth of their content and the brilliance of their language go far beyond what one might expect of "youth poetry."

Our festival kicks off today with an opening ceremony followed by a series of writing workshops. Tomorrow morning the competition gets going with our opening bout, in which we vie against four other teams. The way it works is this: Each team sends up a poet (or a group of poets) to perform a three-minute poem. A panel of judges will assign a score to that poem based on whatever vague and subjective criteria they choose -- sort of like figure skating circa 2002. Teams take turns performing poems through four rounds. Five teams, four poems per team, for a total of 20 poems. At the end, whichever team has the highest cumulative score for their four poems wins the bout.

In the afternoon, we will have a second bout. The teams with the best combined performance from the first two bouts move on to the semifinals the following day.

Everyone here -- poets, coaches, judges, and festival organizers -- understands that there's something ludicrous about judging poems on a numerical scale. We believe going in that we may have the best group of writers in the country, and thus, a great shot at advancing, but there's really no telling what the judges will do.

At this point, it's all about the excitement of being here. Young people from all over the map, from all sorts of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, are coming together to celebrate literature and the power of their own voices. It's a beautiful thing. I'll tell you next week how it went.

Scott Beal is a stay-at-home dad who teaches in the Literary Arts programs at the Neutral Zone. To read about his experience at the Brave New Voices festival in 2009, click here.