–Featuring Poet Laureate Hakim Bellamy as Keynote Speaker
July 29, 2013, SANTA FE – NMSA state charter school launches its 4th year on August 12th with the biggest student body to date: 212 students representing 37 communities throughout New Mexico. This year, 70 new students will attend NMSA, coming from as far north as Taos and as far south as Las Cruces. Applications poured in for this school year from students wishing to attend NMSA. “We’re really onto something here,” says NMSA-Art Institute Director, Riis Gonzales. “Word is getting out [about the school] and we’re expanding as much as we can to meet the demand.”
NMSA recently earned an A grade for the second year in a row from the Public Education Department –positive proof that an arts education improves student academic achievement as well as enhances creative aptitude. Even before the school year begins, NMSA students have been recognized for excellence: the NMSA Chamber Singers have been selected to represent the state of New Mexico as the 2013-2014 All State Honor Choir at this year’s All State Music Festival and In-Service Conference.
NMSA’s Opening Day Ceremony, closed to the public, promises to be a lively event as students, parents, faculty and staff gather in the NMSA Large Rehearsal hall to reconnect and celebrate the start of the new school year. Albuquerque poet laureate, Hakim Bellamy, is keynote speaker. Hakim became the inaugural poet laureate of Albuquerque on April 14th, 2012, at age 33. His mother gave him his first book of poetry as a teen, a volume by Khalil Gibran. Many poems later, Bellamy has been on two national champion poetry slam teams, won collegiate and city poetry slam championships (in Albuquerque and Silver City, NM), and has been published in numerous anthologies and on inner-city buses. A musician, actor, journalist, playwright and community organizer, Bellamy has also received an honorable mention for the Paul Bartlett Ré Peace Prize at the University of New Mexico. Bellamy is the founder and president of Beyond Poetry LLC. For more information on the author, please visit www.hakimbe.com.