Poetry has always been a way of writing home, to me. I don't really know where I'm from because I was adopted when I was a baby and the records have been kept sealed ever since. I've wondered about who I was since the fourth grade when my family moved from Pennsylvania to Michigan and someone in my grade told me to stand in the back of the line because I was black. As someone who experienced being exiled from a young age, it is probably no surprise that I have worked in many cities across the US but I have wandered to these places with intent and have turned my pain into a pathway for youth to experience the transformative healing power that is poetry.

 

In tenth grade, I  became empowered to serve the unseeable when God planted a dream in me to work within the urban core. Upon becoming a Volunteer Coordinator with American Red Cross, I was given my first chance to advocate for people who were exiled from their homes when I served victims of the 2007 San Diego wildfires. Soon after, I became a residential manager at a transitional home in Washington D.C. for women on the road to recovery from addictions. I began working with urban youth immediately after in Denver and have continued tutoring and teaching at-risk youth populations for the last six years. I currently serve alongside youth who are strong activists for their community in south Seattle. 

 

While working at a day camp in inner-city Denver, I began teaching poetry. I’ve been blessed and humbled to teach spoken word and lyric poetry in each of the cities I have journeyed through. Because of my recent work of teaching poetry therapy at a residential youth psychiatric hospital, I have seen young people heal by naming their pain. I believe this power of naming our pain can cure the wound of cultural and historical trauma. As such, my goal is to guide youth and families  in urban communities into safe spaces where they can express their stories in order to heal from traumas that are too often seen as "normal life"  and be transformed into the person God created them to be. So that in exile, they could be made beautiful through healing and even find a place to call home.