FREE Admission but must RSVP through ticket link below.

Join us for a public reading of the 10 special winners selected from 30 that will appear in the CLP anthology! The reading will feature special performances from the Dallas Youth Poets and a feature poet yet to be announced!

Born of a desire to bring the many members of the North Texas poetry community into conversation with each other, The Common Language Project places participants in the same room and turns them loose to dream. United by a list of shared words and confined only by the space of a page, the poems of the project weave a tapestry of radically divergent experiences that sing, simmer and singe. Together, these poems give us a place to come together, somewhere from which we can start, from which we can thrive.

Now in its second year, The Common Language Project invites you to re-enter this shared and sacred space and give testimony to a transformation. Spin for us a story of strange and dramatic alteration: a change in a body, in a world, in a heart or a mind. Growth or decline, mutation or metamorphosis, confusion or clarity–we want to hear about a transformation that sheds light on the uncharted and unknown.

ABOUT DALLAS YOUTH POETS:

Dallas Youth Poets seeks to provide a platform for youth in the greater Dallas area to hone their craft as poets.

The program is facilitated by award-winning teacher and poets & mentors Princess McDowell, Terry Odis & Rage Almighty. Initiated in Spring of 2012, Dallas Youth Poets was designed with the goal of teaching youth poets that their voices are their power and with their voices they can write the wrongs of the world one poem at a time.

Students who actively participate in the program throughout the year become eligible to compete in the Dallas Youth Poets area wide competition, where the highest scoring poets form the current year's Dallas Youth Poets team, that will go on to represent Dallas at the Brave New Voices youth poetry festival.