“I used them all already.”

On the steps of San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House at around 11 p.m. last Saturday night, 17-year-old Kai Davis finally ran out of words.

The silence was a little disconcerting, given the fact that words—specifically Davis’s gift for summoning them, piecing them together, and spitting them out in corkscrewing contortions—were what earned her Philadelphia-based slam poetry team top honors at the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival just minutes beforehand.

“I’m elated,” she said after a moment. “[Poetry] is everything I ever needed to stay alive. It’s just the most freeing thing in the world to me.”

Now in its thirteenth year, Brave New Voices is an annual event that pits about 500 young poets from 50 cities around the world against each other in an Olympic-style tournament. Davis and Team Philly (a.k.a. “Team Dashiki,” a.k.a. “Team Black”) traveled approximately 2,500 miles to participate; other poets, like those from Guam, Atlanta and Leeds, traveled even farther. The Bay Area team was comprised of six locals.

This year’s festival played out in a series of quarter-final and semi-final “bouts”—each one composed of five teams and four rounds. As the weekend progressed, the field narrowed from 50 teams to 20 to four. Saturday’s final included participants from Philadelphia, New York City, Denver and Detroit. The Bay Area team was knocked out by Denver during the semi-finals.

The festival has two main purposes, according to its founder and co-executive producer James Kass: it creates a semi-structured “safe space” in which youths have three and a half minutes to express themselves without fear of punishment or retribution and it also helps develop a “counter-narrative” that challenges misperceptions about teens in America.

“There’s a lot of negative representation of young people in the media, especially young people of color,” Kass said. “It’s an opportunity for kids to say, ‘this is who we are. This is what matters to us…We want to be part of the solution. We want to make life for all of us better.’”

In 1996, Kass started Youth Speaks, the organization that puts on Brave New Voices, with the hope of bringing creative writing to a more diverse population. In 2009, an HBO series titled “Russell Simmons Presents Brave New Voices” chronicled the lead-up to 2008’s final. And last year, HBO aired the 2010 finals with hosts Common and Rosario Dawson. The festival’s steady expansion, Kass said, has encouraging implications.

“If we are able to really grow our capacity, I think the opportunity for there to be these real international cultural exchanges is pretty phenomenal,” he said.