AUBURN — L/A Arts is excited to announce that Maine Writes poetry students from Edward Little High School will be participating in a live poetry slam competition on June 3 in New York City.

“New York has no idea what is coming,” says a thrilled Ahmed Mohammed, who, along with the rest of his classmates, has never been to the city. The students are part of a class which has received a full-year, 30 week poetry residency from L/A Arts. Arts educator Oren Stevens has teamed up with classroom teacher Jill Hyland to teach the students poetry and literacy-based skills and basic poetry slam performance. Their learning has been expressed in original written pieces they will be performing at the competition in New York. The poems are about powerful topics from their lives that have importance to them.

The students in Ms. Hyland’s class have already performed their pieces at L/A Arts’ Annual Awards Dinner last April at the Franco Center, and at a presentation at the Auburn Library in early May. They will be competing against other high school students from Brooklyn and the Bronx. Three finalists will be chosen to perform in front of an audience of 500 people in the Lovinger Theater at Lehman College. Winning students will receive special commendation and awards.

This is the first trip of its kind that L/A Arts and the Auburn schools have partnered on, and they hope to make it a mainstay of their programming. “This is going to be one heck of an adventure,” said Hyland.

You can follow their travels online at the L/A Arts facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/laartsme.

L/A Arts is pleased to have worked with two outstanding partners from New York City on this project, Arts in Education and technology organizations the Dreamyard Project (http://www.dreamyard.com) and Global Writes (http://globalwrites.org). The Dreamyard Project is a non-profit Arts in Education organization located in the Bronx, NYC, which since 1994, has served over 125,000 students in 100 public schools with the power of Arts in Education. Global Writes mission is to promote literacy, communication and collaboration among young people through the integration of performing arts and technology resources.