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HOUSTON, WE HAVE POEMS!

META4 Houston are the 

BACK TO BACK

Brave New Voices

Champions!

We are pleased to announce that The Travelers Foundation provided Meta4 Houston with an
award of $10,000!  Thank you for your support!

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WHAT IS META4 HOUSTON?

Coached by Outspoken Bean and Adam Mac, Meta4 Houston is the face of the youth poetry slam scene. Meta4 represents Houston to the world at slam competitions, including the International Brave New Voices festival. Each year hundreds of teens compete at the Space City Slam Series, vying for a spot on the Meta-Four team. The top six competitors at the final Space City Grand Slam earn a spot on the prestigious team. Meta-Four Houston takes the voices of youth to powerful new heights through one-on-one mentorship as well as local and national performance opportunities.

MEET THE  META4HOUSTON  TEAM

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ADriana

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Amaya

Amaya “Jade” Newsome is a graduating senior at Humble High School, who will be attending Texas Tech University in the fall. She has been writing poetry since middle school, but started taking it seriously this past October when she joined her school’s Slam Poetry team. She also partakes in theatre; she was in her first musical at five years old and has fallen more in love with the arts ever since. This is her first year as a member of the META4 Youth Poetry Fellowship.

Adriana Winkelmayer, a junior at The Emery/Weiner School, has been doing poetry for much of her formative teenage years. She draws from her experiences as a socially introverted queer Latina-Austrian, dedicated to artistic accountability and equal representation. When she’s not conceptualizing stanzas in her mind, she’s running her school’s literary magazine, hanging out with dogs at work, or on the lookout for queer representation in multilingual formats. She is a Meta4 veteran, having been on the team since 2021.

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Bella

Bella is an Indian American performer from Houston, Texas who loves poetry, music, and spending time with her dog, Sweetie Pi. She is passionate on issues involving women empowerment and gun violence awareness. She has worked closely with UNICEF USA and the Houston Mayor's Youth Council as an advocate for climate saving policies in her community. Bella attends HSPVA as a 9th grader in the theatre department and is a member of the 2024 Meta4 Youth Poetry Fellowship. 

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Cristina

Cristina Perez Ruiz is a seventeen-year-old poet who is in her junior year of high school at HSPVA, where she majors in vocal music. She has always had a passion for writing and began taking it seriously in eighth grade where she joined her first poetry group in which she addressed many social issues. Since then, she has fallen in love with slam poetry and has continued to look for opportunities to perform and improve on her craft. This is her first year on the Meta4 team, and she is beyond thrilled to be on it and to spread her message at open mics, performances, and competitions alongside her teammates.

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Mya

Mya Skelton is a poet, musician, and all out thespian. She finds inspiration in the lives of those around her and of course from the stage, allowing her to write not just her own experiences, but even that which she has not lived through. She is a new coming member of the Meta4 Youth Poetry Fellowship and is a Junior at Humble High School.

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