"Like a bonsai tree, an idea can be seen growing and growing, but we never see its final stage," said Neya, the Best Written Poem Winner of our 2026 Poetry & Spoken Word Competition. "I started where the bonsai tree grew and I stopped where its roots ended."
Read on to learn more about the extraordinary minds selected by Youth Poet Laureate and Guest Judge Evan Wang for our April 2026 writing competition for teenagers.
Read the winning piece here!
You chose to open your poem with a question, which Guest Judge Evan Wang praises as "[ringing] like a timely bell throughout the piece." Why did you make the choice to start your piece this way?
I chose to open my poem with a question because it is the same one I started with before writing. "What do you want to say?" And once that was said, I revisited the question again: "What do you want to say?" This time, I had an answer. For me, this phrase served as the guiding point for the entire poem. Over and over, when I was unsure of the next line I would ask myself this question. Of course, in the poem itself it serves a slightly more confining nature - less of an invitation and more of a pressure. But, by the end, the question once again returns to its original nature, the same way I saw it before - not as a resolution, but a continuation.
The simplicity and length of your piece caught our shortlisters' and guest judge's attention. How did you know when to stop?
To me, poetry is the extent of emotion and meaning that can be conveyed in a canvas of any size. I chose to keep this poem relatively short because I thought it would perfectly parallel the content of the text. Like a bonsai tree, an idea can be seen growing and growing, but we never see its final stage. However, in the fifth and final stanza, there's somewhat of a contradiction. While the poem itself is quite short, the last sentence is split up between three lines and uses the word "and" twice. I wanted this contradiction of an (almost) too long sentence and a small canvas to portray the existence of both envy and growth in the same shared space. That is to say, I started where the bonsai tree grew and I stopped where its roots ended.
Read the best spoken word piece here!
Your piece shifts between a sort of youthful innocence with brutal honesty and a matter-of-fact awareness about this deep-rooted social issue. How did you hit that balance in this winning spoken word piece?
In general, I feel that the balance came naturally, as it reflected my honest inner state. I knew about Asian fetishization, about Asian American discrimination, and about gender-based violence, but reading Jennifer Hope Choi's article was what really revealed to me that we often look past the most marginalized people because there are louder voices. Honestly, I was a bit bewildered, which is where I feel that the youthful innocence kind of showed. I was bewildered because I couldn't understand what society wanted from these Asian women: they fetishize them and then disregard and shame them, all in the span of one breath. As an Asian American woman myself, it seemed to me that society wanted us to lose either way, which is what drove me to write the poem. Then, for the matter-of-fact awareness/the brutal honesty, it really came in response to the Atlanta spa shootings. I was younger and less socially aware when it occurred, and now, as someone more informed, it shocked me that I had never known the full extent to the incident. Thus, most of the blunt language used directly reflects my thoughts after watching the full press conference and hearing the comments on Robert Aaron Long, which is where it may have contributed to the mentioned balance.
What leaders or writers have inspired your own work?
For poets, I’ve been inspired by ‘The Bee’ and Phil Kaye, often by the raw emotion they are able to convey beautifully with their words. For leaders or social activists, I’ve been inspired by Amanda Gorman and Malala Yousafzai, for their bravery and resilience. In particular, though, this poem was inspired by ‘White Man Speaks Mandarin’ by Lisa Shen, along with ‘There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions’ by Audre Lorde and Jennifer Hope Choi's New York Times article 'Georgia promised Koreans the American dream. They got something more complicated.' As an Asian American woman, these three works in particular were what shed a new light onto the Atlanta spa shootings and on the interconnectivity between issues of gender-based violence and racism, which motivated me to write this spoken word poem.
Read the winning peer review here!
How do you approach feedback for a poem as opposed to other forms of writing?
What kind of advice do you have for other teenage poets who want to improve their craft?