About the Contest:
The 2021 We Read Youth Voices Young Writer’s Contest was a collaboration between Madison Public Library, Forward Madison FC, and the Wisconsin Book Festival, with funding from the Madison Public Library Foundation. Young writers across Madison were encouraged to submit stories on the theme of Teamwork - but not to limit their ideas to sport. We encouraged any story, poem, song, or submission, that celebrated a community coming together for a common goal, whether or not they were successful. This anthology represents highlights of those submissions, judged by a panel of Madison community writers and advocates for youth. We sincerely thank all of the writers who found the courage to share their voices with us: you are truly an inspiration! Read more about the contest.
Judges:
We would also like to acknowledge and thank the panel of community judges who helped determine our winners, runners up, finalists and honorable mentions. Thank you for joining with us to encourage youth voices in Madison! Judges, pictures clockwise from top left, include: Tikeh Tazeh - Local Youth Author; Jaclyn Vitela - Board Member at the Madison Reading Project; Scott Gordon - Publisher of Tone Madison; Tina Marie Maes - Lead Cataloging Librarian at Madison Public Library; Poet Fabu Phillis Carter - Madison's Poet Laureate, 2008-2012; Angela C. Trudell Vasquez - Madison's Poet Laureate, 2020-2022; Kevin Mullen - Associate Director of the UW Odyssey Project; Alexis Dean - Teacher and Entrepreneur.
Not pictured: Jody Mohrbacher - Collections Librarian at Madison Public Library.
Foreword
by We Read Youth Ambassador Tikeh Tazeh
One of the most challenging things to do is to write a story. It’s just as difficult to write a poem or a song, like many young writers wrote and composed for the We Read: Youth Voices contest. Yet 41 kids were able to persevere and submit masterpieces for the competition, and for that, I am immensely proud of the depth and breadth of the writing talents of the youth in the Madison area. This year’s theme was teamwork, and as a major sports fan, I was excited to hear this. However, when I began reading the submissions, I didn’t see many sports stories, but something much more significant. There were stories about kids working together to support a friend, students helping each other out for school assignments, and even a story about the teamwork of ants! This shows that the idea of teamwork goes much deeper than communicating on the court or calling plays on the field. It is the effort of a group of people to achieve a common goal, and that couldn’t be shown better than it is by us young writers.