Simone Crew (left) is now a freshman at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

Today’s episode of QUEST-TV includes a 2-minute segment that marks our first collaboration with the San Francisco spoken word presenter Youth Speaks and The Redford Center, based in Provo, Utah. For the past four years, these organizations have been putting on a contest for young spoken word artists who perform poems about environmental themes. In our first installment of QUEST-TV’s Youth Speaks Green feature, 18-year-old San Francisco poet Simone Crew performs excerpts from her poem Yasmeena, which she originally performed at this contest. You can download a copy of the complete poem here.

Through Youth Speaks Green, we’ll explore how young people in the Bay Area view the challenges of becoming green. We’ll be looking beyond clean fuels, efficient vehicles and solar panel rebates and delving instead into the personal. Crew, who is now a freshman at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, wrote the poem when she was 16 and centered it on her experiences with an eight-year-old girl called Yasmeena, whom she had babysat. Through Yasmeena’s insistent questions, Crew began to feel the weight of the responsibility to conserve the natural world for her. In an engaging play of mirrors, we as the audience get to watch Crew observing Yasmeena, as Yasmeena makes sense of the world around her.

Crew will be performing a new environmentally-themed poem at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2010, as part of a Youth Speaks team.

In coming episodes, we hope to present you with the work of other talented young Bay Area poets in our Youth Speaks Green segments.

Watch the Youth Speaks Green television story online.

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