Simone Crew
San Francisco, CA
As a Spoken Word artist, Crew has performed for a National Public Radio broadcast and was featured in “Brave New Voices,” an HBO documentary about teenage poets across America.
Crew first got involved in performance poetry in the eighth grade, when an artist visited her school from Youth Speaks, a San Francisco based organization that organizes poetry workshops and promotes youth advocacy and literacy. “I started identifying things that I had been writing as having potential to be onstage,” Crew says.
Crew performed with Youth Speaks throughout high school, and was part of the San Francisco team of young poets featured in HBO’s “Brave New Voices,” which she described as “incredible, in terms of letting people around the country get in touch with the community and art form.” Crew was also on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” with Lauren Whitehead, a mentor and friend from Youth Speaks, and Robert Redford. The live broadcast, in which Crew read one her pieces and discussed youth activism, reached over 8 million people.
“So much of my exposure and experiences have had to do with luck,” she says. “As an artist, you can advance as much as you like, but without resources or audiences that are willing to invest in your success, communities can become very insular. I have been very lucky.”