2026 Hays Youth Poet Laureate Celebration & Book Launch

Join the local community in celebrating the annual Hays Youth Poet Laureate award

With a vision to create a Central Texas sustainable literary community by promoting literacy in underserved and marginalized groups, and by directly involving local writers in the publishing process, the Hays Youth Poet Laureate program was born for poets and writers ages 13-19.  

The goal of the program is to not only get students to appreciate and value their own work, but to connect them with artists of similar backgrounds that have paved the way in pursuing careers in creative writing. The hope is to open doors to young writers and show them their dreams are possible! The Youth Poet Laureate program, rooted in Hays County, promotes literacy through poetry, and is an opportunity for both underserved youth and the local community to get excited about the literary arts.

The winning manuscript will be chosen by guest judge Carrie Fountain, and will be edited for publication by Infrarrealista Review.  The chapbook’s launch will be celebrated with a reading and book signing at The Price Center & Garden in San Marcos.  The winner will also have an opportunity to assist as an editor for an issue of Infrarrealista Review, and are encouraged to attend Infrarrealilsta Review's monthly poetry readings to share their original work.

Special guests this year are 2019 Texas Poet Laureate, Carrie Fountain, and 2023 Texas Poet Laureate, ire’ne lara silva.

The event is free to all poetry lovers.

Sponsored by The Burdine Johnson Foundation, the Center for the Study of the Southwest, & Infrarrealista Review.

Carrie Fountain is a poet, novelist, children’s book author, and screenwriter. She is the author of three poetry collections, The Life, Instant Winner, and Burn Lake, winner of the National Poetry Series Award, and the novel I’m Not Missing. Her children’s book, The Poem Forest, tells the story of American poet W.S. Merwin and the palm forest he grew from scratch on the island of Maui. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review and The New Yorker, among many others. In 2019, Fountain was named Poet Laureate of Texas.  Currently, Fountain is the Literary Curator at The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.

ire’ne lara silva, 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate, is the author of five poetry collections, furia, Blood Sugar Canto, CUICACALLI/House of Song, FirstPoems, and the eaters of flowers, which won Gold for the 2025 Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book (ILBA), a comic book, VENDAVAL, and two short story collections, flesh to bone, which won the Premio Aztlán, and the light of your body. ire’ne is the recipient of the ILBA 2025 Rising Stars Poetry Award, a 2025 Storyknife Writers Residency, the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for Best Short Nonfiction, a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant, a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant, the final Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award, and was the Fiction Finalist for AROHO’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award.  Visit her personal website for more information.