—Arshia Simkin, The Underline
United Arts of Wake County, in partnership with the Raleigh Fine Arts Society, recently hosted the second Spoken Word Competition for high school students. On January 7, twelve finalists, including Carrboro High School’s Milagros (“Mili”) Lopez Secena, were chosen. The contest was open to schools in Wake, Orange, and Durham Counties; to enter, students wrote an original poem and submitted a video of their performance. The winners were chosen by a panel of professional poets, including the 2023 Piedmont Laureate in Poetry, Dasan Ahanu.
All twelve finalists were recorded by a professional videographer at the North Carolina Museum of Art and appear on the Wake County United Arts website.
The top three scoring poems were honored at a reception at the North Carolina Museum of Art on January 28 and received cash prizes. The videos of the poems will also tour the Triangle on a set of signs with a QR code for people to scan and experience the spoken word pieces.
For Ahanu, an accomplished spoken word poet and scholar of poetry, the contest is a way for young poets to express themselves and their personalities: “It is one thing to read their words on paper. It is another to allow them space to deliver them in the way they intend,” he said, via email.
I recently spoke with Secena to learn more about her passion for poetry, her inspirations, and how it feels to share her work with a wider audience.
Secena is a soft-spoken fifteen-year-old who loves running, being active, and drawing. She first got interested in poetry in 6th or 7th grade when she first encountered Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird.” “I just found it inspirational how she was able to express herself and was able to cause something that was affecting her to change, in a way,” Secena said.
Secena, whose mother is from Honduras and whose father is from Mexico, said she is often inspired to write about her heritage; because of her ethnicity, Secena said that she’s “been told many times that I can’t do certain things or that I’m not meant to do it.” When she writes poetry, she challenges these assumptions that people make about her. She also finds solace in poetry when things get tough in her personal life: when Secena’s parents went through a difficult divorce a few years ago, Secena said that “in some ways, it was easier to write what I felt to them.”
A Carrboro High School teacher encouraged Secena to enter the Spoken Word Contest, telling her that it would be an opportunity to use her voice. “I was nervous to do it, but when I found out I was one of the twelve finalist, I was very excited,” Secena said.
Secena’s poem—titled “ What I Can’t Do, Can’t Hold Me Down”—is about resilience. For Secena, her poem is also about pushing back against prejudiced narratives: “when you come from a background [where] you only hear bad things about it…I try to use the poem as a way to show that it doesn’t really matter who you are,” she said. For Ahanu, what stood out about Secena’s poem was that, “The message was powerful and necessary. I consider it a declaration,” he wrote.
I asked Secena if she had advice for other students interested in poetry. She said, “When I first started writing poetry, it was really bad. In order to get good at it, you really have to practice it.”
“Poetry is a way that everyone can connect and express themselves,” Secena said.
See all twelve finalists and their videos at https://unitedarts.org/programs/high-school-spoken-word-contest/
