Sarah Kay

Well, it started back in 2014.

I was teaching at a school in rural Georgia with another poet named Franny Choi, who I love and who was working with me at Project Voice for a while.

And we did performances and we did workshops.

And then after school, we were invited out to dinner by some of the English teachers, which often happens.

And at the dinner, they had brought along two students.

high school boys, two students.

And that's unusual.

Usually after hours, the students are home, but they brought them along to dinner and we had a lovely dinner, all of us together.

And after dinner, one of the students who I want to say was maybe even like on the high school football team, or I think he was an athlete.

He was like a polite guy.

you know, Southern gentleman asked if he could walk us from the restaurant, the three blocks to our hotel to make sure we got home safe, which we thought was very sweet.

And when he walked us home, he handed me this letter that he had written on notebook paper and the letter was,

was about how much my poetry had meant to him and how excited he was about poetry.

And he used lines from my poems in the letter.

Wow.

And I have a line in an old poem, there is a girl who still writes you, she doesn't know how not to.

And he ended his poem by saying, there is a boy who still writes poems, he doesn't know how not to.

Wow.

And there was something about the letter that just really got me.

And it was sort of like, when I'm writing poems, I don't think I'm writing poems for a high school senior on the football team in rural Georgia, but also maybe I am.