Minnesota Youth Poet Laureate
About Minnesota Youth Poet Laureate
The Minnesota Youth Poet Laureate (MYPL) celebrates our nation’s top youth poets who are committed to artistic excellence, civic engagement, and social impact. Teen writers (ages 13-19) are invited to submit a portfolio of their original poetry and a CV that showcases their artistic excellence and community impact. Local and State Youth Poet Laureates participate in dozens of national convenings, workshops, and performances each year.
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Questions? Contact Corey China |
Inaugural Minnesota Youth Poet Laureate Announced
Meet Sienna Lee of Moorhead, Minnesota (age 17), the inaugural Minnesota Youth Poet Laureate. As Minnesota’s first Youth Poet Laureate, Sienna will serve a one-year term as a public ambassador for poetry—appearing at events statewide, engaging communities, and participating in national youth poetry convenings. She will also receive mentorship from Minnesota-based poets and literary organizations committed to artistic excellence, leadership, and civic engagement.
Sienna serves as Executive Editor of the Minnesota-Dakotas Key Club, representing over 3,000 students across three states. Her work has been published in the Minnesota English Journal, and she has received multiple Scholastic Arts and Writing Awards across poetry, journalism, digital art, and painting. She is also the youngest nominee for the 2026 YWCA Cass-Clay Woman of the Year Award and serves as her school’s media representative. Through her writing and leadership, she is committed to humanizing lived experiences and expanding access to the arts. She advocates for interdisciplinary creativity, encouraging students to see contrasting areas such as STEM and the arts not as opposing paths, but as complementary forces for innovation. Her work reflects an enduring commitment to her community of Minnesota.
First Mealby Sienna Lee steam left its fingerprints, beads of water gathering on the cupid’s bows of lips whistling thoughtless words through the small gaps of our teeth. we ate black-bean noodles on an upside-down box, the only furniture yet. we pretended it was a table that could hold whole conversations, the kind we’d seen in teledramas. we were seven and nine, slipping and then my brother, the eldest, tried out his new voice, sharpening his r’s and l’s into the shape of this new country. i watched the moles on his face rise and fall with the chewing, flecked with dottings of black-bean sauce that he didn’t realize gave away his age. the noodles cooled between us, with the only evidence of its warmth left on our cupid’s bows. |
About the NYPL Program and Urban Word
Founded in 2008, the National Youth Poet Laureate Program is an initiative of Urban Word – the largest and most comprehensive youth literary arts organization in the country – in collaboration with local arts and literary organizations, Arts Councils and library systems; and is supported by the leading organizations in our field, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Coalition, the Library of Congress, the National Parks Service, and the Kennedy Center.
The Local Minnesota YOUTH POET LAUREATE® PROGRAM is a program of the Minnesota Humanities Center in partnership with Urban Word.
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