my name is Charles Trot i am a visual artist and arts educator uh also the founder of DIA dia is Diasporic Images of Africa dia A we seem to be acronym
heavy in this country um so I just jumped on the bandwagon but at any rate what DIA does is I identify include and redeem Africa's
position as the premier civilization and culture bringer to the world now that might sound a little egotistical um well it's not egotistical because my name is in
Africa have seen um but as you know Africa for quite some time even now when you speak of Africa amongst people who let us say are obvious African descendants right even
some of us Africa oh my god you know they they can't and they won't you Uh but we need to at least understand and number one the scientific community not
me has said that all humanity evolved from the continent of Africa yes we've had other humanoid types and they came and were in different portions of the world but homo
sapiens sapien which we are descendants of came out of Africa look it up i'm going to move on the other thing as an obvious African descendant all I don't care what's on
your birth certificate i don't care what your teachers your preachers your mother or your daddy or whomever told you you were in terms of a race there's only how many races one can't hear you one one
so if you're human that's the only race there is the human race okay now since this is women's history month as you seen you haven't read you can read at any time up until the end of the month but those packets right there will give
you uh a little snippet of some of the things that are in the display case uh we are as you see the title is women hear see and right now okay women
just like men here they see they make an interpretation of what's going on in their world and they write about it this is throughout history they say poetry began some five 6 thousand years ago i don't know they say in Samaria okay it
sounds good to me what we would call now Samaria's uh uh modernday Iraq but none of that really matters we'd like to pay a little bit of homage to Nikki one of our and I say our in the black community
of course she was one of our queens of poetry and of writing um and because we she recently passed we've also spoken of some other women um which you can read about and you'll also
read about here george Harjo her connection for me was that she's Muscogi now if you know anything about indigenous Americans you know Muscogi is the same thing that you will find there's a group of them in Mexico in
northern actually it's northeastern Mexico called Mus Muscoa same people these were they're also known as the Creeks these were all a part of the Trail of Tears but John
Horse and a few others john Horse of course was seol he made a left turn as we were going to Oklahoma and said "Come on y'all we ain't going to Oklahoma." So that's how you have this community of Muscogi or Muscoa
uh in Mexico but I'mma stop talking let me introduce these ladies right here because they are the poets and the writers that we speak about so we'll start on this side and move our way over
your name please hi my name is Nicole Fowler i go by Nikki um I am a visual artist painter um as well as poet um I I've been using art to heal for maybe 15
plus years at this point so hope you enjoy hi my name is Samira Shabbaz Balo i am the founder and facilitator of a women's poetry creative group called When Women Speak um we are 200 women
strong uh across the country uh internationally as far away as Italy as far north as Canada as far south as Jamaica um and we come together to do presentations such as this which we are having a few of our members here today
to share poetry i'm also a visual artist i'm a photographer and yeah I'm a writer and author and publisher and all of the above so um at some point today we're in the library you might want to take a peek at um our When Women We Speak anthology which is on the table and we
also are right on the cusp of um publishing our very next anthology which should be breaking uh the press sometime this week and I have um it's a draft copy just to give you a peek at what's coming and then I have my own anthology
of just my work also um on the table and in a few you'll see a couple of my visual art pieces because my my kind daughter is going to go out to the car and pick them up for me so welcome and thank you thank you for having us and we we're
hoping to share some work with you and we have one more member she's circling the block looking for parking space um hello my name is Vanessa i visual artist but I do a lot of most of my things I do digitally so I do photography I do digital art animation
game development and a little bit of music done i am currently writing a children's book it's going to be my first children's book i will be publishing it within a month or two so I can get a physical copy as well as a digital copy and I had a publisher reach
out to me um about a week or two ago and it was just on Instagram out of the blue i was like this God works in mysterious ways so I'm ready to do that it's an exciting adventure for me and I'm completely out of place but um my name
is Felicia Simmons um most everybody in the room um I've been writing poetry since I was young before I knew how actually to speak or um verbalize myself to the public or outside of my head um
um I've published stuff as a new youth you know you go that route um but I learned um in my maturing age that I write out of inspiration not dedication and um I have such respect but my my
poetry comes out of moments and um it is how I speak and now that I'm much more comfortable speaking right i have a natural cadence and it just comes out you know i I sound like a fortune cookie every day okay
every day wow nice all right um what we're going to do is I'd like to ask uh the ladies some questions just a few questions so that they can sort of explain their
connection that their work has and they feel they have to of course the African diaspora but before we start that how many of you have uh heard of Phyllis Wheatley just raise your hands don't
don't be shy if you haven't heard of Phyllis it's okay she been gone by what 300 years okay some of us know Phyllis she is the first uh Africanamean black woman whatever to be p published they
published a poet you can read a little bit about her right there also that's why I give you these you can read about her in there okay but what we don't hear and I just bumped into this other lady is Lucy Terry lucy Terry Prince as a
matter of fact 20 years Phyllis's senior but they couldn't find any of her work except for one she is known as a great legal mind and orator because she was living in Vermont she had some problems
with her neighbors you can imagine what they look like and what the problem was but she was able to argue successfully not once but twice at least um uh her case against her harassing
neighbors and as usual the courts and the people who witnessed this case thought they were astounding okay she wrote only one poem that could be retrieved it's called the bar fight but it's not a bar like we know bar refers
to a field okay so anyway we're all here i'm glad you made introduce yourself hello my name is Eduina Simmons and um probably joining the team here thank you guys for having me speak up
please i should speak up i'm sorry my name is Edwina Simmons and uh I'm a poet healing from I grew up in New York New Jersey and I'm here representing with when women speak okay i'm glad now we're we're all together
great and uh a quick quick sidebar i just met Amira we were artists during um an art exhibit that we spoke about for Black History Month uh down in Cuba and come to find out and like I said
about her she has many talents what she already told you but when I heard that she had a poetry group I said "There it is." So here we go all right we going to start with Felicia if you don't mind and
we'll work our way this way you want all three or just the first question well one one at a time ask ask me okay all right you write this please all right how do you feel your work and it's probably this is not verbatim but how do
you feel your work um relates to the African diaspora so um like I I said earlier it was pretty much um I was a little black girl born in around 1980 right i lived in
um born in Neptune i mean born in Long Branch lived in Asbury then moved and started school in Neptune and we were busting right we were bust I was down the hill girl you know right off right off the ad right and we were busting up the Somerville up the hill and the only
little brown kids at that time that was pretty much in the school and this is the 80s right um was me right and of the people that came in on my bus which was funny one of the lady here earlier was u one of those right so um it was it was a
different kind of time and um it wasn't and I was always known as pretty much a busy body know all right i was a little odd girl who um had a really high IQ but was pretty much told to sit down and shut up okay let me let me let me stop
you just for a minute stick to the African diaspora all right you use the phrase even I'm using the phrase okay right so um being um being of the African diaspora here and at that time is you know being a little chocolate
girl um in the 80s was not necessarily popular the only person that looked like me was Opa Winfrey and Neil Carter off anybody know Carter right that was the only person who I can say looked like me and um anyone who spoke like me there
was no one who spoke like me um you know who read and who was you know I was fascinated with Princess Dye because we shared the same middle name so um being a little black girl in this world and and actually learning to u verbalize yourself was a learning process
that's the short version thank you okay how my work inspires the African diaspora is I try to tell a story because I like to tell stories i like to build characters and world building i like to make characters that are
uplifting so when it comes to like the black community majority of the time in the media it's very negative anything you see about us is negative i want to take the opposite approach and just bring up uplifting ideas like we do have motivation we do have um ambition within
our community and that's what I'm going to be showing within my artwork okay so we're talking about being related or connected to the African diaspora and my work is all all speaking screaming shouting um DNA African
diaspora who am I who were we and where where do we fit in this human fabric uh piece of quilt um I know growing up um they didn't teach us these things and I'm kind of older than most people sitting at this table so I have lived
through the civil rights movement of the 60s um the things that you hear about uh Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and all those civil rights activists I lived that that was a part of my childhood um and I always wondered like what was this
thing that black people quote unquote were were experiencing that made us so different than those that were around us and what was it that we really were trying not to be or to be my
children took great pride in being of Caribbean descent so they always had a statement of my family immigrated here during the turn of the centuries not understanding or not realizing even I didn't realize that well there was life
before the 1900s so before my my family were on that island they were somewhere else before that and having that knowledge or growing into that understanding this is what the African
diaspora is dropping people that you kidnapped from a continent all over the world um giving various uh hues various um religions various ways of being
because we're not one people we never were uh we need to understand that when they grouped us together um now we are American and I like to say that I am human before I'm anything else so I'm
going to stop with the subclassing I'm human and I am a descendant or ascendant of the people of Guinea Basak by way of the Caribbean by way of New Jersey i have no family in the south because that
was our root here um being um migrants and immigrants at some point and collectively a part of that African diaspora where we're all connected by some DNA fabric and now here we are living together um and hopefully one day
harmoniously um so my work I guess includes or displays um African dysphoria in in regard to or in ways of one we we are that in and of itself my story um is like so many other
stories um pieces of what you hear that I say or I share you may be able to resonate with relate to um and along the way and throughout history you see you hear you know I know so many women so
many people places or going in like seeing and meeting people in places and being in these spaces where their voice is silenced they feel like they can't speak up they feel like what they have to say has already been probably said um and I feel as though we should still be
shouting everything that we go through from mountain tops be it positive be it negative because history repeats itself because my story can look like somebody's story 200 years ago 200 200 years in the future i want to share it i
want to say this is this is all of us this is this is my people so um I think of how my work relates to the African diaspora i think of a a phrase that I started to say when I first started to write um I was asked to come
into a room and they asked why do you write and um the only thing that I could think to say was I speak for black women with no voices because um at this point I've outlived a lot of the women in my
lineage who've come before me they didn't get to live very long and um from knowing that there was such rich stories behind the tragedy from which I lost them you know and I think when I think of the African diaspora I think of the
fact that like we're now doing all these DNA tests but a big part of it is where in the world and how in the world can you identify yourself can you look into the world someplace far away and you know the shape of your face the shape of your nose the the the timber of your
voice the natural rhythm of the music that you hear where in the world can it be identified and I think that there is a rhythm or a sound something the way that I project what I've experienced that someone somewhere can identify themselves and say okay this might be
the situation which where I was born and but this won't be the story that I identify myself with in totality is is bigger than that and I love to be able to write from my experiences because I feel like it can draw back a place to say I've I've been there and there is
something after there because um so many people's stories in before they get a chance to see the after and it I think that's a tragedy so to be able to bring their stories and my story as we live it and the things that I learn as I learn them to poems and hopefully that um you
know that resonates with somebody who need to find themselves somewhere in the world because that's what I needed when I started to write you know I'm going to ask each of you If you could give us a call a short one
you're out of love with me bro oh really i'm a narrative poet so Oh you Oh oh you were preaching i'm sorry i'll try to cut it down okay okay i tell you what i tell you what no I'm only doing this because I'm I'm trying to keep time yeah and And um you
know as you know we still have two other questions but they weren't as important as I wanted uh I guess to to get a feeling and a taste for what you do you can see some of Ramirez's
photographically you will see and read her written but I figured I can get a shorty but since she's a preacher I don't know well I'll tell you what i I'll I'll I'm short i'll do one for the evening and
then that will balance out me being a longer whatever you want to do but I just I wanted them you know each of you to now wait a minute i don't that's why I said that way she's the writer of children's books so we're
going to exclude her but the other lady uh they oppose so whoever would like to go first we'll Whoever wants to work it out all right i found the short one go ahead i'll start i I'll break my thing here
all right so I was reading a poem by a young brother and I decided to uh make my own version of it and um it was called 20 things to call a black boy right so I came up with well I think theirs was 10 things to call a black boy
and mine is 20 things to call a black boy because I'm a black boy's mother 20 things to call a black boy from a mother's heart one
human two rival to the heat of a summer evening three first born of this land we stand on four cold waiting for that fire wind in its back he's a runner five
guilty before they even ask his name six antagonist to every protagonist story seven monster till you prove them wrong eight gone like the wind took you
nine target soon to be martyr 10 slipping away slipping away gone 11 gods with spades wearing black cloth black face 12 soul to a grieving powered lime sneaker 13 grief of a mother's heart 14
bold dark coral that shines anyway he's Onyx 15 i thought about leaving this one blank but who am I to call my sons nothing
16 a prayer that learned to fight back and run fast 17 mama's joy in the breath she holds tight 18 prayer at night waiting for God to answer 19 a heartbeat a heartbeat a heartbeat you can call him
brother Moana my son 20 call him son home wow [Applause] okay i'm supposed to all righty um this one I I did my TED
talk but I you can go online see that one there's one that's been strolling around in my head for a little bit um I'll say the name after it's finished it's quicker than yours i write out inspiration delegation i hold on to it's
a thought or a feeling um I may have been in denial may have been in mourning for a while but the love of my life is gone and sometimes I feel like this bishop's pawn see the lost of you cut so deep watching the black and blue bleed into the sea but without you who do I be see I'm old
school down the hill like Smitties and Miss Daisies when there was a Miss Ida that boogied on down and there was Ferman was our queen that didn't need a crown when my grandmother who lived in Bradley cells selling loose cigarettes and dollar bears without that who do I be see sometimes I hear the echo of you
in the talk what's good queen right or the ghost of you in the wall without that who do I be when no one knows my true attribute is muffy see I may have been in denial i may have been in mourning for a while but the love of my life is almost gone and sometimes I feel like this bishop's pawn see the loss of
you cut so deep cuz that was my black and blue that bled here in these streets without you who do I be when there's nobody left that knows that my true attribute is Muffy see some might call me Miss Simmons some might call me mom or auntie but I truly know who I be i be
Felicia D otherwise known as Muffy from the Lost Tribe of AP wow guess I'll go ahead my mother doesn't know how beautiful I think she is how I view her as art partly because
I never told her partly because I never learned how to until recently gone back and forth with myself internally like like how do I get her to see how do I get her to understand that at the time I needed her she was a wreckage of a mother but now is a masterpiece of a
being how do I get my inner child to understand that me accepting her and the now could be so free tell this artist's mind that not all art is aesthetically pleasing some art can look broken until you allow yourself to see this whole taught myself not to view from the
surface but from my soul she the mosaic I'd hang on my wall the mosaic when touched I used to cut myself on shards of her mistakes embedding themselves into me making me believe she was who I had to be how do I tell her that she's the work of art that I'm glad she taught
me not to be that she's the one and only exhibit that I travel lifetimes to see i've traveled my lifetimes to see such beauty mom Queen this affirmation is long
overdue you are beautiful i love you this poem is called The Thrones of Lesser Houses i'm sitting in a chair the arms are sticky from too much touch there are grooves worn in from too many panicked
fingers the fabric bindings of this chair barely hold it together it synthetic fibers itchy and obstinate against my skin the goose pimples won't go down i will them to they tell me they are at war with the chair for the prime
real estate that is my last nerve it is cold i pray the numbness is hypothermia i pray I freeze i pray to one day be thawed by an evolved species capable of cheating death or at least sparing me the duty of requirement to crisis I feel
illquipped for this chair is exactly two squares forward and four squares left to the pedaly floor to the this from this chair to her hand to her bedside one stride diagonal I count the three silent sisters are praying remembrance of my
mother's soul stretching awake throwing frozen tears for a second my bitterness sees their eyes sewn close with linen and covered in painted onions eyeballs protruding from their hands and their prayers sound like I told you souls
calling her the nicknames of girlhood nicknames they took away decided they didn't suit her lifestyle she wanted to be called diamond i silently scream a ball of words I can't spit out make it hard to breathe i want to be angry but
my cowardice becomes kerosene and I pray they open the window and let me out with the other toxic fumes a hospital bed is no place for fiery deaths there are six in the room i wonder why it seems we were each praying to God for different things i pace my breath in 9-second
expansions in each direction on both of our behalfs my mother breathes more erratically now and I wonder how doctors so accurately predict death but won't fix it the chair groans almost in agreement and the ball of spit in my throat gets jealous nine times the rise
and fall of her chest pauses every time I scream each time evidence of my inability to learn lessons evidence of my inability to show up readied and reticent to the duty of survivor i am 20 years old it is the 20th day of the
second month of the year 2002 synchronicity making me aware that death is in the room it is time no one says to me but I somehow know with the punctuation of a shoulder a hand on my shoulder one I wish could hold me steady
i'm not ready this moment this is where the cataclysm commence the changing of the cruel guards the light in my mother's eyes have been replaced by fear we look in each other's eyes for every 24 seconds searching for someone mature enough to convince us it's going to be
okay finding an extension of the fear and looking away this year is 12 steps to the door of our room one square forward i will someone send rescue prayers go ignored for a moment I look forward to later in my heart behaves erratically at the implications i see
myself make the steps to my mother's bedside hold her thin darkened fingers lift her body and run from the room taking her to the witch doctor healer with my thin wrist as offering taking her to the river for one last attempt at baptism taking her to the
park will be two fire signs sharing quiet time amid the comforts of the burning like we used to but my feet won't move i watch and listen for 369 scenarios of heroic ways this night could go but my feet won't move so I sit
in a chair with my fingers in the throne claimed by a dynasty of daughters dealing with death and fighting the urge to be the one they call deserter [Applause] all right i was going to you know I was going to ask them uh about time you know
what time period do they seem to gravitate to and well I still ask that but they already given me a mouthful so I don't know maybe I put that one aside
um but one thing for me I've also heard is um I feel there's a lot of saying going on okay you are reaching back to the past dealing with it in a present
context and certainly all of this prepares us all especially you for the future um I don't know it's just my interpretation um let me ask you this
last question and uh the one I tried to throw in there for the last minute i think I forgot it oh yeah how could I forget this given the time that we are in now it is 202 we have a new
president we have a new How important do you feel your work is in this particular moment as we move forward we can start anywhere anyone can answer i've always believed that um you can
look back as old as the Bible and I feel like the poets the creos the storytellers have always been the ones to write the history of the day it's from their perspective you know and their creation births a certain narrative you know that we feed off of
but we are writing the history of today as as it relates to our experience and I think that's important for every poet you know um I actually agree piggybacking off of what she's saying I I feel that it's
ever so important um for all of our work or my work and other black and brown artists work to um continue forward um especially during these times um is very prevalent because one we have someone who's trying to make sure our history
gets erased or not talked about um hidden away so that we can forget and we shouldn't be in a space where we should ever forget um and I believe just sharing and reliving and like she said like being the storytellers and being
the marker of what's happening in the present moment leaving a mark on what's h like right now 2025 5 2024 2023 2022 we were here this happened going forward this is what was going on or we can look
at it I don't know so maybe we can try something different but I just think that it's ever important well as my two um peers have said we are go so our job is to tell the story of history of now and hopefully help people
to propel themselves into the future the weapon of poet is always their words their words their words and one of the things that I encourage our poets our group to do is to be published and I find myself saying to them always that
even after we're gone those words on those pages will outlive us they will touch somebody they will help somebody understand who we really are and the other most important thing about a poet and a poet's work is we are telling our
stories we get to say what the narrative is we get to tell our truths you cannot rely on other people no matter who they may be to tell you who you are and what you should be this is the job of a poet
through the oratory works that we have given through the stories that we get from our grandparents and we take into our hearts and we pass on to our children we spew out into the environment I myself as a teacher for 20s something years every day in the
classroom if they didn't have that support at home it was given from me we shared our lives we shared our stories and it is very very important in fact we can't live leave home without this Um to go off of what they said we all
have our own perspectives so I think it's good that we all have our own written things we all come from different generations so generationally we will view things differently so I feel like that would be beneficial for the future so we write what we went
through now and we carry that on to see what happens within the 10 years 20 years 30 years so on so what we experience now we will learn from it we'll write about it and then we can redirect it for the new generation um I think for um now and in history and
the importance of now I'm a I'm a fan of history right because history is horizontal and it's not um vertical right um so we limit and um when I learned as a child we talked about early um um earlier about um getting the
vibration right science class and and God right and when you spoke and speak a word out of your mouth the vibration of your your mouth and the words that you form changes the environment and you know in second third grade you learn about the butterfly effect and the butterfly you know might start a
hurricane across the world or a ripple in the pond or rock in the pond might start a typhoon because everything is tied together so I'm always been spoken because I'm dyslexic so early on right they were like "Oh she's so brilliant." But it didn't translate because I
couldn't get it out written right and then I was put in a space where I couldn't speak it right so it was I was trapped right it gets trapped in my brain sometimes over and over again but being able to speak it out and having the boldness to speak it out and
speaking in this time that's why I would never be silenced by anybody right i' I've learned um and this is a life right um I have more fight than I have flight and um in that space we need to know that we need to have fight in our space
to remember where we were cuz that's exactly where we still are and we will be unless we make conscious changes to do something different and it can start from a little old person like me right and I think I get bold to people who be like I don't know how she do the stuff they do i can say only God right because
that's the that gives that bold because you know I used to shake right when I used to speak I used to trimmer trimmer I still do a little bit right but I'm compelled to get out there and say and do right so that's that's how I think that we can affect um right now in the
the climate of having um forgetting right or being pushed to forget right but especially black in this country right I I my trace my line back in the Carolinas since before we can go back to about
16700 right um we we we've always been here we've always been black here and um so just just knowing that and then pushing that to the future my aspect of the diaspora so just that's that's how it was relevant for today and again I
could talk a lot about that one diaspora comes in a couple of well at least two different ways that I have learned of course starting in Africa but also when we talk about the indigenous Americans
many of you would talk about them as Native Americans you know I don't like that term so I will say indigenous because it tells time and history is about time humanity goes back how many
hundreds of thousands of years if not millions okay And this we mentioned our story our story it's not just ours as black people you have brown red yellow
white probably some other color I haven't named as long as you're people you're on this planet it is our story as obvious African descendants because remember everybody
is here you're African descendant too i don't get what they told you but as black people African-Americans obvious African descendants we've been trying to be erased for how long since we got here what do you say 1619
nah started around 1500 still at it so let's see how well let's see how well this bunch does but at any rate I'm appreciative of the
ladies coming out um the folks when you come in you seldom get a chance to really look at and digest the artwork of course um we we as visual artists like to sell our work but more importantly it's the
theme i just want to point to one piece over here because now I'm talking but I'm not going to talk long you see that orange red yellow violet pieces you see those four images
the one on the left in West Africa it's right here in the showcase it's called the Papa Doll the one up top okay is from the Hopi tribe and or
nation um it is like the Aquaba it is about fertility all of these symbols are about fertility life some say the ankh is a representation of the female's
reproductive system the cowry shells also fertility all right oh sorry the cacina the hopi and some of the other southwest uh indigenous people use
kacina dolls as well some of the photos that Sister Amir has brought in I recognize as being from Cuba but from other places from here you know these women the power of the word
whether you're doing poetry or you're acting words have power and conversely silence has power too okay but it's much more entertaining educating
when I hear it in the form of poetry or music don't take it for granted you know y'all y'all know that music they start singing about their love and the whole thing and you know whether it's blues jazz R&B doesn't matter they're lyrics
words the power of words how are we doing with time 654 654 any questions cuz I always Now come on wait hey I see you sleeping back there don't let me take my shoe off you're you
i'm talking you Mr norman no any questions or comments please nada can you talk a little more about your children's book i'm sorry I can't hear children's book oh yeah um yeah so the
book is about a child who's you know being restless and it's about the mother she needs the virtue of patience dealing with the child who's not going to sleep so I use it that uh story to uh work around the scripture of one of the
spiritual gifts that we are gifted and um so that's what that's about like I'm still fleshing it out i still I like have the written part of it so I'm going to go back home and finish that up but that's the um the basics of what it's
about thanks any other questions comments now is the time and I see Yes so I'm also a poet
and storyteller and co-sign everything all of what you said so thank you so much for sharing all of your words whether poetic or not and um also uh descendant of genocide survivors also use my writing as a therapeutic healing
form of creative expression and I'm curious for any of you who want to answer um how you balance writing about joy and writing about pain um do you go through seasons right is it just what inspires you to get out in the moment of
what you're going through is it something you can write more um joyously or joyfully after you've gone through something is there even an awareness but is is there a balance for you because right they kind of coexist and contrast each other and each play their own role
and make for a lovely song too i can answer mine quickly because I write out of inspiration not dedication um my pieces are alive um was telling Mr tried earlier it might move around in my head a thousand times until I either speak it
or I write it down and but if I do it without writing it down or catching it it's gone yeah right because it's it's for that moment right and there's uh prayers that I say all right um it is um the transition is is it could be a
joyful moment it can be um a pain that's pulling at me right it but it has to be said is compelled and it's inside and it breaks out and so mine again I told him earlier I write out inspiration not dedication i don't sit there today i'm
writing like y'all i don't do it right it's it's something that just comes out i could write every day for a month or not write for a year yeah i'm not thinking that anybody Well I don't um I'm definitely emotional i'm definitely if you show me something that
I see I need to see that's going to be a whole poem it's going to be about a day long and I'm going to have a a a beginning a a peak and a decline and by the time it's done somebody in the audience going to be saying hallelujah yeah I live that
too i'm I'm I'm a I'm a narrative poet i tell stories and my stories come from the interactions with other humans and I don't have many love poems and the reason that I don't have love poems many
is as my friend says anybody got time for love poems because there's so much out in the world that I need to grasp talk about digest and spew out in a way that people get to understand the relevance and the importance importance of what we are doing to other human
beings so each and every poem that I have is going to strike somebody's emotion and I was told at one uh poetry reading my last poem talked about um one of my nephews who was was gunned
down that was the last poem in the set and so there were like no dry eyes and one lady came to me she says "Honey the next time you perform don't end with that phone." No because it was really emotional so I
understood but then I have to write what I feel if I'm not writing what I'm feeling you guys are not going to feel it so when I'm reading it's it's from that emotion is from me taking myself back to that point
in time and expressing what I felt because I know somebody else out there has gone through that and may not be able to speak it the way that poets do thank you i think I think there is a sort of
redemption in telling a story just as it is you don't always have to you know close out you know because a lot of the poetry that I've written comes from a place of this idea that
either you when you experience something it's only a tragedy if you didn't learn something from it you know so sometimes the lesson is for the listener to learn so sometimes you don't have to necessarily write that in you see that I did through to the end
but I don't feel like I stopped giving this place where I needed to find to to feel like I'm leaving someone out on the bleeding edge because every negative experience bears a positive one if you can learn from it and sometimes you know it's a responsible thing to leave that
space for that lesson sometimes you know you go too far and you're like you know there is you know you have to show the way to a place of redeeming but you can't always have that ending for someone else in reality so to feel responsible for always writing it seems like you're taking away the opportunity
from the person that's listening to what you're writing about so yeah life in itself there's a duality so sometimes you swing this way and sometimes you swing that way but honestly telling the experience from where it is and being as honest to that as possible takes away
the responsibility of feeling like you need to feel it for for another person you know i love that you said that like piggybacking off of I guess the both of them I too am emotional um and I feel a lot of feels
and think a lot of thoughts when I'm driving i love driving i love just being in open road spaces and um when I'm reflecting on just my life or others if I hear stories or I am in the mental health behavioral health field so I'm a
counselor i'm talking to individuals coming from work kind of decompressing to unpack on the way home I'm kind of releasing those emotions and those thoughts and things and at times many times um especially if it's more so my life a lot of poems come up or a lot of
thoughts or a lot of lines for po come up so I literally pull over and like I'll write it out um and I'll just write the raw emotion be it positive negative um there used to be an older version of me that especially if it was negative because I had a series of very long and
negative poems um for a very long time um where I would hold on to them or sit with it like I'll write it all out even when it was negative and try to come back to it from a logical like standpoint to try to create like beauty from it but then I recognize because I
have some poems that I enjoy doing that but I I really like the raw emotion in the moment um just to keep the story natural and and going um so yeah I I say if you can't feel it you can't heal it
so feel your feels but they're different genres like every poet has a different way you've heard all of us we're not the same we're coming from different angles and some people just like to write poems that make you smile and flowers and trees and comedy i just don't happen to
be that person i'm I'm going to tell you about somebody's life mostly mine okay that's um Well you know I mean you say you're emotional and and you ladies always get tagged with that oh they so emotional oh oh men don't have no
emotions huh oh men can't cry huh oh you old punk you old sister hey if we weren't supposed to cry we wouldn't have tear gums it's not about it's not about any of that okay it's about and a matter of fact that's
part of our problem as men in general we have been trained not to feel not to respond you know that type of thing we will live on and a lot of what we're told and a lot of what we're
trained to be is going to have to be shed or we're going to have a very very difficult time living these next few years okay i want to just say one thing for
me i remember the term diaspora and I associated it with holocaust i first heard those terms probably in high school you know but they seem to be no
one seemed to use it as I grew up to this old rascal you're looking at now I said you know there've been many holocaust diaspora that means a people leaving from a traditional geographic area
moving out moving away so everyone has a diasporic story you Irish you got one you Scottish you got one greek please we got Greeks in America where else we got them french
whomever okay so but I don't think generally again that we as Americans understand what we say many times and certainly what is said to us we don't think about it we We're the worst in
terms of using this English language but that's enough for me i'm glad please anyone else quickly quickly comments questions please don't be shy no you can't talk of course she can talk no I just want to say thank you very
much it was really beautiful you're welcome all of your everything that you guys offered to us thank you thank you thank you thank you i admire you because I'm I don't feel like I'm a poet you know to to get those
words out so thank you and everyone had something that touched touched me there was this this book that I wrote a long time ago it was literally a collection of crumpled
napkins and papers and and notebooks and just things poetic expressions I thought would never see the light of day and then um one day you know my influence like Sister Amira and others she like they're like "Publish it put it out there so we can relate to it." So I had
the courage to do it and and this is just within the past few years and it's really saved my life not for the point of trying to be any sort of image but to find an outlet for what you feel and to put it down on paper because sometimes you can go back and look at three lines
and you will see a whole universe of what you were experiencing at that time and that is important just to have a place where you can identify yourself i think that's the importance of thinking about the diaspora where do you identify yourself in this world you identified in your words and you speak in relationships with people i think we all
need someplace special where we could just put that so you don't have to I I wish I would have never undermined the things that I was doing and how important it was to me feeling as though it needed to be something grandiose for someone else so just collect it i would say I encourage everybody that I meet
who feels like they have any type of poetic inkling if that might be your thing even if you never share it with anyone else it's a great outlet at any point it like this is one of the things that when women speak is is quite famous for we have people who have never ever
ever thought of being a poet or writing or presenting their work in front of anybody they're in the group and they sit at the performances and at the end sometimes Natie will get up i'm ready now so and so will get up i'm ready now
we just finished a retreat in Cuba with writers and it was one girl who never wrote anything she she just my cousin she just came along cuz she wanted to go to Cuba when she got finished though she wrote three short poems and what I read
in her work was she was waiting for a moment where she could feel she fit in yes mhm and sitting and looking and listening to the poets that she was with she thinks she found it she's published
so you can be a part of her want to speak we welcome you i want to say thank y'all ladies right let me real quick i want to say thank y'all ladies because what y'all have for me i've been um a friend asked me to write something so I've been playing with like a little article but u another
friend literally pulls me and then just writes down stuff that I say to send it back to me later and I'm always I was against like I don't need this but I'm going to write some stuff down and I might I might put in a book i don't say now I got the time but um it is it is
I'll pull up all my notebooks that I have stored around the house well you're welcome to submit to the anthology it's open calls all the time and you submit water and you're in all right all right and here is there's a question
oh oh sorry question um for I can't um I see you have some books when you came inside and I've been just thinking to myself um do you deal with um childhood trauma like individuals that go through and is that my profession yeah what deal
with poetry within my poetry do I have poems in uh breathing through concrete just from the name can't you tell right all right so that not only deals with the the trauma that children have it's the trauma that families have it's the
trauma that parents suffer even if they may be the cause of the broken child so breathing the concrete are several stories like that and what they are com are are compilations of different people's
stories into one poem so you're thinking you're reading about one character but you're really reading about five or six who had similar experiences and look this is a poem now from the girl whose mother left her at the school never came back for her from the girl whose mother was standing on top of a car calling her
name through the window at her school embarrassing her cuz the mother was on on drugs to the children that the the uh protective services came to the school and extracted them from the school and drove them off in a black limousine never to be seen again so their
classmates are traumatized i'm sure they're traumatized and the fact that their mother showed up at the school every day she's traumatized so to answer your question I hope I did see I told you I talk a lot yeah that's reading through concrete
okay um I'd just like to close with one of the quotes that you'll find in your packing this quote is by Maxine Kingston she's in here too i'm just going to read it to you very briefly in the Chinese culture to talk
story is to pass on knowledge wisdom and history it is to talk of all things the quote reflects the importance of storytelling in her heritage which plays a central role in her works such as the
woman war so when you look through these okay whenever you do you'll see I have quite a selection of different cultures races the whole thing even though there's only one race no I know i know
well I'm still affected by myself talk about trauma look at me you know how long you got in your pants why cuz of light skin come on so but indeed I bring these
things up because we are still a problem we are all a problem you know no matter how we feel about it and until we can really put it to rest so I thank the ladies of women speak coming
out and I thank my other two ladies for coming my local ladies and um you know what I'm saying [Applause]