A dead deer, a dick pic, obedience; girlhood, sainthood; plastic flamingos and shattered language: Welcome to the 4th Annual TEEN SEQUINS celebration! We are honored this week to present another galaxy of poems.
This year, poems flew to us from all over the U.S., from Canada, Indonesia, France, Japan – from all over the world. One hundred and fifty-one teen writers (yes, you!) bravely sent us your voices , and as always, we ardently wish that we could feature more than just one poet in each age category!
Our 2018 Teen Sequins featured poets are Ottavia Paluch (14), Taylor Fang (15), Sophie Paquette (16), Vidhima Shetty (17), Morgan Levine (18), and Annabelle Crowe (19). The work offered by these writers is exemplary of what we see teenage writing is in 2018: full of wonder and watchfulness, furious and self-aware.
As we put together this feature, it was a pleasure to realize that all of our 2018 poems are written by women, some of who are people of color, some of who are disabled. We don’t look for any particular kind of voice or background when we read work – we choose poems that chime with us most deeply- but we are proud to find that we are holding up voices which often must struggle to be heard.
On a similar note: We read somewhere recently that women are much less likely than men to re-submit to literary journals, but our 19 year old featured poet, Annabelle, has been submitting to TEEN SEQUINS for three years, and it wasn’t until we accepted her poem this year that we realized this fact! We hope that Annabelle’s story can serve as an example to all of our teens who submitted this year, and to anyone who might read this feature – a rejection from a publication doesn’t always mean no. Sometimes it means, not yet. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Enjoy this week of poetry, follow along with all the Gigantic Sequins social media, and share share share this wonderful work with everyone you can! Until tomorrow…
Happy reading and writing,
Robby Auld and Sophie Klahr
Teen Sequins co-editors
Gigantic Sequins 