Fresh Heat celebrates 20 years of amplifying Baton Rouge youth voices

A small stage in Baton Rouge has been helping to hone the voices of teens in Baton Rouge for two decades—teaching life skills, confidence and, of course, poetry. 

Fresh Heat, a youth spoken word poetry program, has been giving students moments to build confidence and inspire themselves since 2005. After years of setbacks, including funding cuts and the COVID-19 pandemic, the program has made a comeback, offering a space for Baton Rouge’s young people to be heard in a unique way. 

As part of that return, the program is celebrating its 20th anniversary with the Humanities Amped Annual Research Conference on April 30, highlighting its history and impact on the community. 

Fresh Heat began as a small open mic event, built with borrowed lights and carpets to create a welcoming space. It was the brainchild of Anna West, a Baton Rouge native who was inspired after working in Chicago’s youth poetry scene, where she first saw how powerful spoken word could be for young people. When West returned home, she wanted to create the same opportunity here.

“Young people want to be seen, and they want to be heard,” West says. “What we can do for them is provide the space to listen.” 

The program expanded quickly into schools all around Baton Rouge. 

“It was really the first time a lot of these young people had interacted with their peers from different parts of the city,” says Susan Weinstein, an early supporter of the program.

Through poetry, students shared stories about race, identity, family and daily struggles—topics many of them felt they were not allowed to talk about anywhere else. 

“They realized they had a lot more in common than they thought,” Weinstein says.  

At its peak, Fresh Heat wasn’t just a poetry event, it was a community. But over time, the program began to fade. Funding cuts and leadership changes disrupted the structure, and after COVID-19, the program faced trouble regaining momentum.

The loss felt personal to former students like Kalivyn Marquix Morris, who first heard about the poetry program his sophomore year of high school in 2016, when he says he was looking for a space where he could be vulnerable. 

“Being Black, being queer in the South is always a difficult thing to navigate, and so to have a space where I was fully embraced on that journey to further figure out how to identify myself was so necessary,” Morris says. 

Each year, a citywide poetry slam event chose a few selected students to compete in the Brave New Voices competition. Morris remembers his first experience at the competition.

“There were a lot of times we were dismissed being from the South … the idea that what we had to offer artistically and creatively wasn’t valuable,” he says.

Other students like Kaiya Smith, who Weinstein says “gave the best hugs,” were also a vital part of the program. Weinstein says Smith’s poetry challenged audiences to confront uncomfortable truths about race, with one poem sparking backlash in a school performance.

Smith passed away during the summer of 2016. The following year, the Brave New Voices competition team, which included Morris, honored her on stage. It was the same year they won the competition. 

“Opening up the final stage honoring Kaiya was like a reset,” Morris says. “You can go far by just being yourself, being earnest to the people in the community who nurture you.”

In 2022, Morris was determined to bring back the initiative after seeing how the pandemic had disrupted the imagination space for youth. He began working with students, leading writing workshops and helping them develop their voices, like the program had once done for him. 

Humanities Amped kicked off Fresh Heat this year with three events in January, February and March. Now housed at Tera High School, organizers are expanding again. In September, a Fresh Heat event will be held at the Youth City Lab on Government Street.

As Fresh Heat enters its next chapter, the mission remains the same: to give young people a voice, space and the confidence to tell their stories.

Join Humanities Amped at its 20th anniversary conference to learn, listen or even perform your own poetry.