12 Weeks • 10 Youth Artists • 1 Performance

Journal 2 Journey

Upcoming Events

Developed in partnership and collaboration with Urban Word, Journal 2 Journey, is a pre-professional, creative youth development initiative. This 12-week program for ages 14 to 21, links youth poets with professional artists to increase opportunities to achieve life goals, learn new skills, and collaborate with other artistic genres.

Through an application process ten participants are selected to participate in a paid 12-week intensive. Working collaboratively with professional theater artists, directors and choreographers, participants work to refine their poetry and writing while devising a professional one-act theatrical production. The program culminates with a live public presentation. 

J2J inspires young artists to imagine the possibilities of writing that expand beyond traditional forms, styles, and genres while providing a platform that celebrates young voices. Previous participants have gone on to pursue careers as stage actors, playwrights, and designers.

Launched in 2004 in partnership with Urban Word, Creative Legacy Projects and New York Live Arts, Journal 2 Journey (J2J) is a pre-professional creative youth development program designed to expose youth to the world of devised theater with a focus on Youth Leadership Development, Tiered Mentorship, Artistic Rigor and Social Justice. J2J aims to provide a platform to:

  • Develop theater artists who are birthed from an Urban Arts and Spoken Word tradition

  • Foster tiered mentorship through past participating youth assuming various roles on staff to continue their career growth

  • Collaboration amongst leading organizations who invest in the future of the field by sharing resources and cultivating diverse leaders

2023

Themes

  • Social Justice & Activism

  • The "American Dream"

  • Citizenship & American Identity

  • The Experience of America's Youth

  • Democracy, Voting Rights & Other Political Issues

Participants

Facilitators

  • Osh Ashruf is a Drama League and Tony Award-winning theatre and filmmaker. He is building a body of work across roles and disciplines to help the world see and deliver itself in cleverly nuanced and (insha’allah) whimsical ways. Osh’s greatest production has been running for 10 years — Broadway For All (BFA)--the arts and entertainment industry’s equity, diversity, and inclusion national training program and movement he founded in 2012 — for which received a Tony Award Honor for Excellence in the American Theatre. Osh recently had a dual-residency at New York Stage & Film for two projects: Director of George Abud’s stage play with music, The Ruins, and writer of the TV Pilot, Untitled Broadway Habibi Project.

    Osh likes to act when roles are truly delicious, like in the Public Theater production of The Vagrant Trilogy. He recently starred in and produced an original pilot, My Friend Will, which was an Official Selection at the Tribeca TV Festival.

    He was a Co-creator/Writing Collaborator on the 2021 Drama League-nominated, interactive game show-play, American Dreams. He is a producer of Michael R Jackson’s Pulitzer and Tony Award-winning, Broadway musical, A Strange Loop and the upcoming Broadway revival of Merrily We Roll Along, starring Daniel Radcliffe. He was a Harold Prince Fellow in Creative Producing at Columbia University, where he started development of his Broadway-bound, Prince-commission musical, two feature films, and a TV Pilot.

    He will be directing his short film, Driver Found, in Fall 2023. Osh is currently the Creative Producer of César Alvarez’s musical, NOISE, directed by Soho Rep's Sarah Benson. Osh was an Associate Producer at the Frederick Zollo Company where he helped with the film, Till and the musical, Sing Street. Select acting for TV: Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, HBO's High Maintenance and NBC’s The Blacklist, Law & Order: SVU. Film acting includes All We Had with Katie Holmes.

    Osh holds a BA in Theatre and English Literature and a BS in Secondary Education from Loyola University Chicago and MFA in Acting from Harvard University and the ART/Moscow Art Theater, where he was able to spend months studying and seeing theatre in Russia. He was named a Presidential Fellow from Harvard's Office of the President. Osh is passionate about education and mentorship and gave a TED talk at TEDxBroadway, where he now serves on the leadership board. A Teach For America alum, Osh spent some of the best years of his life as a NYC public school teacher for five years before committing to a lifetime as an artist.

  • Karl Michael Iglesias contains multitudes. He is a Puerto Rican actor, director, and author originally from Milwaukee, WI. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin and First Wave Hip Hop Theater Ensemble, he continues his exploration of verse on the page and of contemporary performance in verse. Karl found his way to the stage through international spoken word festivals and as an emcee, opening for acts such as Anderson Paak, Mac Miller, Chance The Rapper, Ludacris, and Kendrick Lamar to name a few. Since then, Karl has presented verse work at The Public Theater, Dance Theater of Harlem, and The Kennedy Center. As an actor, Karl is a member of both AEA and SAG/AFTRA Unions and is represented by Innovative Artists NYC.

    As a facilitator, Karl has been a teaching artist for over ten years and is a professional director specializing in heightened language and new BIPOC work for the stage and screen. His poetry can be read in Acentos Review, Florida Review, RHINO Poetry, Brooklyn Review, Kweli Journal, Madison Review, and Breakbeat Poets Vol4: Latinext (2020) among other publications. Karl is the author of Catch a Glow, available now at Finishing Line Press.

    Karl is a proud Puerto Rican Heritage Cultural Ambassador as recognized by the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College. Karl lives in Brooklyn, NY.

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Partnership

Urban Word, Founding Program Partner

Urban Word champions youth voice through the transformative power of the written and spoken word, providing platforms for literacy, self-expression, social impact, and leadership through free creative writing, college prep workshops, and performance opportunities. Urban Word provides young, creative voices, often those who are marginalized, the tools, training, and platforms to rewrite the narratives that shape their lives and their communities.

As one of the oldest and most comprehensive youth literary arts organizations in the United States, Urban Word is the founder of the National Youth Poet Laureate Program, a renowned program that celebrates youth for their excellence as writers and their civic engagement. This year is a continuation of the Fall 2022 theme of the NYC Youth Poet Laureate Federal Hall Fellowship as supported by the National Parks Conservancy.

urbanword.org

Urban Word is supported by the National Parks Conservancy in support of the Federal Hall Fellowship Program.