25 x 25
By Improper Staff Aug. 5, 2016
Agnes Ugoji
The Louder Than a Bomb Massachusetts Youth Poetry Slam Festival lived up to its name when Agnes Ugoji took the stage this spring. In intense, incantatory tones, the 16-year-old performed an original poem about Boko Haram, the terrorist group that’s devastated her native Nigeria. “They have been destroying so many of my people in my country,” Ugoji explains. “I just had to write about it.” Crowned the fest’s first-ever individual youth poetry slam champion, she went on to represent Massachusetts at the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in Washington, D.C., in July—but to Ugoji, it’s not about the competition. “I just see it as a community of young writers coming together and showcasing what we’ve written, sharing all these different ideas.” That’s also an apt description of her experience with 826 Boston, a nonprofit that helps students ages 6-18 develop their writing skills. It operates the Writers’ Room and slam team at Roxbury’s John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, where Ugoji is a junior who hopes to attend Princeton and pursue a career in public health. “I don’t think that I want to make poetry my livelihood, but I would definitely like it to be part of my life,” she says, pointing to poets Emi Mahmoud and Crystal Valentine and Nigerian authors Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as writers who inspire her. “Whatever they write always resonates with me. I want to write about things they write about and topics that they may not have fully touched upon.”
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