Sarah Kay

And I love getting to help facilitate and witness someone else falling in love with poetry and discovering that there is room for them in the house of poetry.

And so that's the drive.

That's what...

continues to bring me to all these different schools and corners.

And so trying to think of, you know, stories from the classroom, we could just talk about that for the rest of the time together.

But I'll tell you something that just happened.

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.