Nothing Just IS: Jovan Mays is a 2025 Unfold Guest Host

Join us for Jovan's session on April 20!

Remember when I told you we were going to bring in six guest hosts this year? I set myself up to surprise you all. This year, there are eight! I’m so excited to announce that Jovan Mays will be joining us on April 20 from 7-9 pm CDT.

Jovan Mays is the inaugural and emeritus Poet Laureate of Aurora, Colorado, a National Poetry Slam Champion, TED speaker and the Youth Voice Coordinator of Aurora Public Schools. Mays has worked with well over one million students through poetry outreach in his program, Your Writing Counts. He is the author of 3 books: Pride, The Great Box Escape, and This Is Your Song. The Pilgrimage, Button Poetry, and Write About Now have published his work. He is a graduate of Chadron State College, where he played football, wrestled, and earned a degree in Secondary History Education.

I met Jovan in

Desireé Dallagiacomo

’s writing workshop, Undercurrent. Each time he reads a poem I feel my heart in my throat and the further I get into my career the more I think that’s the sign of a great writer: someone who evokes a physical response. Jovan is an extremely kind person, a goofball, an educator, and also an athlete. I’m pretty confident he’s the first guest host who is also a high school wrestling coach. We love a poet who contains multitudes! As an educator myself, the way Jovan speaks about and shows up for his students resonates deeply and when he agreed to teach a workshop for us I was thrilled.

Jovan’s workshop is called Nothing Just IS. Experts say, 95% of the ocean is entirely untraversed. To date, scientists have explored about 4 percent of the visible universe. As human beings, we are sandwiched between two gigantic dark masses filled with mystery, beauty, illusion, and so much atmospheric pressure that they literally blow our minds. Yet, we spend so much of our awake experience trying to restrain our thoughts, environments, and emotions. In this generative writing experience, participants will strap into their own metaphoric spaceships and take a deep dive to make our own meanings of the unknown as we look to celebrate the only fact that we know: “Nothing just IS”.

Grab an Unfold membership by March 25 to get access to Jovan’s workshop and 29 others! Drop a comment below to welcome him to the Unfold family!

Check out these links:

• Jovan’s website

• You Are the exclusive author of your story (TEDx)

• The Constellation Zacharias (TEDx)

• This is My Brave (2 poems)

• Black Like

• McKayla

• To the Black Boys

• Jovan’s Commencement Address at Chadron State College

• 500,000 Lights

• This Is Your Song

• Make + Believe interview with Jovan

In other news:

• Join us at our free event “What Would I Even Write About? Getting Ready For NaPoWriMo” on Tuesday, March 25 at 7 pm CDT. Here’s the Zoom link!

• Unfold registration closes in 5 days—have you registered yet?

• Want to help us put up Unfold posters? Request yours here!

• Grab an Unfold merch pack and look cooler than everyone around you

• Refer the most new Unfold participants and win a mini customized poetry book shopping spree from Tristan

• Your Unfold welcome packages are in the mail! Keep an eye out

• Join us in Washington for Camp Unfold this June!