Words are powerful.

I’ve always believed that deeply and innately. The first time I discovered their power was through a YouTube performance of a poem titled “That Girl” by Alysia Harris. And as I look back at it now, it doesn’t feel so relatable but maybe just nostalgically relevant. The performance, the power, the rhetoric and speech, it moved and still moves me. From watching this video, I dove head first into poetry and the art of words. And as I traveled through my own personal tumult, where family imploded and I cemented myself into the destruction, they were the one thing that felt steady, balancing, and true. Poets and writers are the voices of trauma and triumph, categorically in this way. Similarly to the way journalists follow a code of ethics in their response to the truth, I believe poets and writers follow a mission to be the voice of times of tragedy. Poets like Adrienne Rich who wrote emphatically against the Vietnam War and equal rights for women. Poets like Nikki Giovanni and June Jordan who wrote of identity and what blackness and beauty is. And now, as we enter a period of some of the greatest tragedy since the era of the world wars, who is writing us through? It’s a question I’ve posed to myself every day as I listen to the number of casualties rise in Ukraine and around the world from hundreds of other crises. Who will write us through?