This is finals week at the public colleges in Nebraska with Winter Commencement Ceremonies at the end of the week.
Chadron State College has graduation Friday at 2:00 in the Chicoine Center with 183 degrees to be awarded, while the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will have about 1,100 graduates in ceremonies Friday and Saturday at Pinnacle Bank Arena.
Today is Dead Day at Chadron State with no tests. Tests run tomorrow through Thursday, leading into the graduation ceremonies, which are open to the public and will be live-streamed.
The speaker will be poet, author, and motivational speaker Jovan Mays, part of a four-member team that won the 2011 national slam poetry title.
A 2010 graduate of Chadron State who wrestled and played football for the Eagles, Mays is a recipient of the school’s Distinguished Young Alumni Award and is the Emeritus Poet Laureate in his hometown of Aurora, CO.
Since 2009, Mays has spoken at more than 120 events including performances of his commissioned pieces, tributes to veterans, and judging the poetry slam at the Sterling, CO, Correctional Facility. He has also presented at the Colorado Language Arts Society conference.
Mays has been a Student Engagement Advocate since August 2020 with the Aurora Public Schools (APS), the district he attended, assisting students with leadership development and creative writing.
He is also a specialist coach at Smoky Hill High School, his alma mater, for the wrestling program and provides educational presentations about healthy masculinity and social-emotional learning.
Before his current position with APS, he was a Youth Voice Coordinator for 3 years, creating the first district-wide youth voice platform. It engaged more than 500,000 audience members and 30,000 students with journalistic stories focusing on mental health, resilience, and self-investigation.
Mays believes everyone has their own voice. To help spread that message, he curates the Your Writing Counts youth poetry program in Denver. It engages more than 100,000 students annually through creative writing, storytelling, workshops, and youth poetry slams.
He has been a guest instructor with the Denver Writing Project since 2011, leading teaching sessions for elementary and secondary educators as well as youth campers, and since 2019 has been a volunteer facilitator with Project Pave-True Man.
It’s a program that encourages high school-aged males to make healthy choices and cultivate healthy relationships.
His poem, Borealis, has been interpreted and preserved as a mural in Aurora created by Like Minded Productions, and May in 2018 was a presenter, panelist, and instructor at the world’s largest literature festival in Jaipur, India.
From 2016 to 2017, Mays was the Community Engagement Coordinator with Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver in 2016 and 2017. He raised $8,000 for its community outreach and creative programming, and won awards from the Art Tank, Viewers Choice, and Denver Foundation.
Mays is a member services representative on the YMCA of Metropolitan Denver, which serves 3,000 daily. Since 2010, he has opened the facility at 4:30 a.m. on weekdays and given tours while tending to other front desk duties.
While a student, Mays was a lead organizer of the annual CSC talent showcase “Release” for several years and presented a Graves Lecture in 2009 about slam poetry and spoken-word poetry.
In 2008, Mays participated in a panel during the second annual Diversity Forum attended by more than 225 Chadron Middle School students. Mays quoted Martin Luther King about the dangers of “sincere ignorance and conscious stupidity.” He also recited Impossible, a nearly four-minute poem he wrote about conquering issues of race.
“Being diverse is not just being a friend of someone who is of a different race or embracing people because of those differences,” Mays said. “Every time you read a book, every time you go to class, every time you learn something new, you are constantly making yourself more diverse.”
In 2016 and 2017, Mays returned to Chadron State in 2016 and 2017 as an invited speaker at CSC’s MLK Day observance.
Mays said when he overheard racist comments during his underclassmen years at CSC, he often remained silent. As a CSC upperclassman, however, he found his voice and spoke up in similar situations. He encouraged the audience to do the same.
“Don’t default to silence. Speak up for yourself or others when you hear racist remarks. Start those difficult conversations at the dinner table. Speak up a little bit. You can learn how to confront others without being argumentative,” Mays said. “You can start in small ways in your own area of influence.”
In November 2019, Mays wrote a poem, The Constellation Zacharias, memorializing another former Chadron State student, the late Zack Muma. in a TEDx talk. As a CSC sophomore in 2007, Mays helped monitor Muma’s Type I diabetes. Muma died in August 2013 before his second year at CSC.