Literary Riot: Welcome Home? The Harsh Realities of Immigrants’ Experiences in America
In collaboration with Get Lit: Get Lit – Words Ignite unites classic and spoken word poetry to empower youth and inspire communities. By engaging youth in literature in and after school, Get Lit allows teens to become engaged in their own futures and unearth their potential. "Claim your poem, claim your life.”
"Home" by Warsan Shire
Keithayonna Davis
College Bridge Academy, 18 years old
What inspired your response poem?
A lot of things inspired my response poem such as things that I have been through and things that other people go through that people don’t talk about. I just felt and knew that these things needed to be heard.
How has the Get Lit program and poetry as a whole kept you from falling into the same kind of stereotypes that you see other people you know falling into?
The Get Lit program and poetry help me in a lot of ways to keep from falling into the things that are going on in my community. It helps me separate myself because I spend time expressing my thoughts instead of running around and doing what everybody else is doing.
What do you think you would be doing right now if you had not joined the Get Lit program?
If I didn’t have the Get Lit program and poetry, I would probably be running around in the streets right now. Or probably just going to school, wasting some time.
How do you feel when you are around your peers? When you are together in your Get Lit groups, how do you feed off of each other?
We connect by telling each other what is going on in our lives and relating our stories. Sometimes you will say something dramatic that you think no one will understand or is going through and then someone will say, “Hey! I went through that too.” It feels good to connect with people on that level.
Do you feel the Get Lit program and poetry helps you express yourself in a way that you normally wouldn’t?
Yea! Get Lit has helped me express myself in a lot of ways such as saying things I usually wouldn’t say to other people and sharing things that are going on or that I have been through. It’s like therapy in a way. When I am going through something, instead of acting on it, I try to write about it.