She was a C student living on the north side of Chicago and didn’t feel particularly connected to her education. A first-generation Vietnamese American and daughter of refugees, she found solace in her notebook. Then, one day, an English teacher caught her writing poems underneath her desk.

“[The teacher] invited me to come perform at an open-mic event,” she says. “It was [at the event] that I started to realize that, ‘Wow, I can write these poems; I do have potential.’ College became an option to me at that point because, for the first time, I saw myself as a scholar and finally felt as if I had found community with people who understood me.”

And it was poetry and spoken word that brought Truong-Muñoz to the UW in 2007, after she was recruited as one of the inaugural members of UW–Madison’s First Wave hip-hop scholarship program.

The four-year, full-tuition scholarship program was the first of its type in the nation. Housed within the UW’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives, it’s given students — who specialize in areas such as spoken word, poetry, rap, graffiti, and break dancing — opportunities to hone their crafts and perform together around the world. It recruits a cohort of students that begins classes together the summer prior to freshman year and then continues through the university as a group. The program, which requires that its students are first accepted into UW–Madison, has seen nearly 100 of its members graduate with bachelor’s degrees.

More than a decade since the first wave of First Wave participants arrived, they still carry a sense of community with them. It was the key to surviving — and thriving — in a campus environment that initially felt completely unfamiliar to many of them. With help from their friends and support from their program, they set off in a variety of directions — some of them in ways they never could have predicted.

The Vision That Started It All

Willie Ney MA’93, MA’94 had the idea for a hip-hop program at the UW in the mid-2000s. As First Wave’s founding executive director, he saw potential for a pipeline that recruits students with creative-writing talent in the same way the university recruits athletes. Ney, who at the time was an assistant director for the UW’s Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program, says creating such a pipeline was his “passion project” — not falling under his assigned duties — until he was eventually named the program’s leader.

“Obviously the lack of diversity is a huge issue at the university, but it’s beyond just the numbers of bringing in more students of color,” says Ney, who retired as the program’s executive director in 2017. “We’re not just bringing in students who are diverse; we’re bringing in students who are amazingly talented artistically, academically, and in terms of their activism.”

Focused on empowering their communities, the students go on to use their UW experiences to improve lives after graduation.

“When you think about the power of that group, just the talent, the impact is so much more exponential than what you’d ever think about. You’re not just recruiting one student at a time, you’re bringing in a whole group,” Ney adds, noting that the impact is multiplied with each new cohort. “They’re doing unbelievable things, and they have a UW–Madison degree behind them — which really helps.”

A Ready-Made Support System

When choosing where to go to college, Truong-Muñoz didn’t want to be just another student. First Wave, she felt, offered her the same community and support that she had through poetry slam competitions in high school.

“I’m Vietnamese American and first in my family to go to college, and [UW–Madison] wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for [the First Wave community].”

Fellow cohort member Adam Levin ’12 also found the First Wave community one of the most meaningful parts of his UW experience.

“There was this huge culture shock [upon arriving on campus], and I think First Wave was really important,” he says. “Whenever we were dealing with this kind of culture shock, where suddenly we are on this campus that is predominantly white, it felt like we had this ready-made support system.”

Levin attended Oak Park (Illinois) and River Forest High School (which has a 46 percent minority enrollment rate, compared to the UW’s nearly 16 percent, according to U.S. News & World Report and Data USA, respectively). He learned of First Wave through the school’s spoken-word program, and he, like many cohort members, was recruited through First Wave’s former program director, Josh Healey ’05. Prior to that, Levin hadn’t considered attending UW–Madison. Upon his arrival, however, he felt reassured in his decision, knowing he was part of a group with shared interests — something he wasn’t sure he’d find again after high school.

While a teenager in Boston, Sofía Snow ’11 hadn’t given college much thought. She was a leader in strengthening her community’s youth poetry presence and even earned a Massachusetts hip-hop award for spoken-word artist of the year. To her surprise, the award led to a four-page cover profile in the Boston Globe. She was 17 years old.

Snow then heard from Ney, who was looking to recruit her to First Wave’s inaugural cohort. Despite some initial hesitation, Snow’s mother — who immigrated to the U.S. from Venezuela for both her and her daughter’s education — told Snow that if she didn’t leave Boston, Snow would never have time for herself. “I was just so overcommitted in the city that it was hard for me to focus on school,” Snow says.

First Wave’s sense of community played a role in Snow’s decision to pursue the program. “Willie said, ‘There’s going to be young people just like you from all over the country. … You’re going to be able to meet people from different places.’ That, to me, was more interesting than anything else.”

Cohort member Danez Smith ’12 explains that Madison was initially a difficult place to navigate. Being the only student of color in a hundred-person lecture hall and not feeling represented in the city’s culture became taxing, Smith says. A Saint Paul, Minnesota, native, Smith considered leaving campus.

“I don’t necessarily have the fondest memories of Madison as a place, but I have really fond memories of the people here,” Smith says. “I think there are communities of color and queer folks and just good folks — regardless of identity — in the university and in the greater Madison area that really helped me, but I think Madison has a very sort of liberal dream about itself that doesn’t always translate as true for a lot of people of color here.”

Smith, who uses the pronoun they, decided to attend UW–Madison because of First Wave. They note that professors such as First Wave’s former artistic director Chris Walker and former faculty director Amaud Johnson transformed both their life and UW experience, teaching them to see the world in a more expansive way and ask better questions of it.

For Krystal Gartley ’11, MSW’19, First Wave offered a place of belonging. The cohort’s members may not have felt understood by their family and friends at home, but they connected with each other over a shared love of various art forms.

Gartley was already a musician, and she learned how much she enjoyed performing poetry and spoken word during her senior year of high school. With the support of her teachers, she decided to pursue the program.

“I had a pretty tough upbringing, and writing was my way of expressing my emotions,” Gartley says. “I thought that [First Wave] would be an opportunity to meet other people who shared a similar craft, and I wanted that sense of family on campus.”

First Wave also helped students address some of the misunderstandings surrounding racial diversity on campus, says cohort member Jair Alvarez ’11, JD’14. “[Attending] one First Wave show can change that,” he says.

Having moved to the Madison area from Puerto Rico at age 11, Alvarez dreamed of going to the UW. His mother had attended, but he wasn’t sure how he could afford it — his family faced financial hardship and had been homeless for three months when he was 17. “My college apps were done on my friend’s computer, because I didn’t have one,” he says. Once recruited into the program, he knew he’d be able to attend the UW. Alvarez — a community activist while in high school at Madison West — was also grateful to have an outlet to work on his creative projects.

But being a part of the program’s first cohort also came with challenges, Levin says. Cohort members sometimes felt pressure to prove that the program was worthy of support.

“I knew that there was a lot riding on how well we did in class,” Levin says. “It really felt like we were a part of something that was larger than ourselves, and we were laying the groundwork for something that could be really important to the University of Wisconsin.”

Clockwise from top right: Adam Levin, Allen Arango, Krystal Gartley, Sofía Snow, Kimanh Truong-Muñoz, Cecilia León, Dominique Chestand, Danez Smith, Blaire White, Ben Young, Alida Cardós Whaley. Andy Manis

A Lasting Impact

With the help of her First Wave experiences, Truong-Muñoz — now an educator in California — has come full circle.

“It was when a teacher saw my potential that I actually rose to the occasion,” she says. Now, after serving as a high school teacher and an assistant principal, and earning her master’s degree, Truong-Muñoz directs a branch of a program that helps prepare underrepresented high school students of color for college and encourages them to pursue their passions.

Truong-Muñoz says that the program, SMASH (formerly Summer Math and Science Honors Academy), exists to “smash” barriers for underrepresented students interested in pursuing STEM careers. She utilizes First Wave’s three areas of focus — arts, academics, and activism — as a framework for her work, ensuring students understand the power of their stories and voices. She also incorporates hip-hop in the program’s curriculum, and, occasionally, students will see her rap or perform a poem.

“I’m constantly carrying my First Wave experience into everything I do,” she says.

Similarly, Levin is a full-time teacher in Waukegan, Illinois. Prior to beginning his student teaching, he was involved in the spoken-word program he participated in as a high school student, and he also has cofounded a rap workshop in Chicago.

Meanwhile, Smith is a touring poet who has earned the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, along with being a finalist for a 2017 National Book Award. As a person who travels frequently, Smith says their job necessitates carrying out the Wisconsin Idea.

“I take myself and everything I’ve learned [at the UW], and everything I’ve learned through the world, with me and really try to expand my ideas. … I try to be as open and giving in each of these spaces that I enter as possible,” says Smith, who plans to release a third poetry collection next year.

Before returning to school for her master’s degree in social work, Gartley cofounded and codirected an a cappella group and worked in the Madison Metropolitan School District.

“I feel that being in First Wave really gave me this level of confidence that I didn’t recognize until later in life,” she says. “Developing and cofounding an a cappella group was, I feel in part, stemming from that confidence that I gained while in First Wave.”

Gartley is now pursuing a path to earn her doctorate in neuroscience. She plans to study the relationship between biology and psychology — specifically, the impact of trauma on the brain and body.

Alvarez, who knew he wanted to attend law school after seeing police harassment during his childhood, now leads his own practice as a business and criminal attorney in Madison. He also has served as a liaison for the Wisconsin Hispanic Lawyers Association, as vice chair of the Latino Chamber of Commerce of Dane County, and on the community advisory board for the Overture Center.

“Because of First Wave, I am not afraid of the court at all. I can walk into the court, give a speech, and get yelled at by the judge, and I’m not embarrassed — I don’t get stage fright,” Alvarez says.

Snow, who originally hadn’t envisioned herself in college, graduated from the UW with advanced standing in her social-work degree. Following a few years as First Wave’s education and outreach coordinator, she transitioned to Urban Word NYC, a youth literary arts organization in New York. There she climbed to the role of executive director, where she oversaw the organization’s operations and enjoyed providing students with a space for development so they could access universities such as the UW. Snow was also part of the Bars Workshop, a theater and verse program cofounded by former First Wave creative director Rafael Casal x’10 and original Hamilton cast member Daveed Diggs.

“[First Wave] changed the trajectory of my life, and I really can’t emphasize that enough, how much it’s meant to me,” Snow says. “First Wave taught me what it means to be in community, what it means to collaborate. I owe all of my leadership skills and love for the people, and this work, directly back to this community of folks.”

Sarah Morton

If you were looking for Lester Graves Lennon ’73 back in the late ’60s, chances are you found him at Der Rathskeller.

“I basically haunted the Rath,” says the English major from New York who came to UW–Madison because that’s where smart characters in James A. Michener novels went to college. Lennon could spend hours hunkered down in the Memorial Union hangout, playing bridge or dabbling in poetry.

“When I finished a poem, I’d go around the Rathskeller showing my friends,” he says.

Beyond the Union, the written word played a defining role in Lennon’s UW experience. A standout memory is a Shakespeare course taught by English professor Standish Henning. “I love how he brought it to life,” Lennon says. And he’ll never forget meeting Gwendolyn Brooks; the first African American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry served as the Rennebohm Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in spring 1969. Lennon took her class and came away inspired to keep putting pen to paper.

He continued writing as his path veered from the UW, first to San Francisco and Berkeley, where he worked in a student-owned record store he’d read about in Rolling Stone, and then in city jobs in the Bay area, where he picked up some finance skills. When a friend told him about an investment banking firm starting up, Lennon was ready for the challenge. He set down roots a few years later in Los Angeles, establishing himself as both an investment banker and a poet. The two pursuits, he has found, have a surprising amount in common.

“It’s all about energy, it’s all about creativity, it’s all about trying to find solutions for problems,” he says.

Lennon is working on his third book of poetry, with several pieces started at visits to the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, where he sits on the board of directors. He also serves on the board at Red Hen Press and was part of a mayoral task force that helped appoint Los Angeles’s first poet laureate in 2012.

Through it all, Lennon has maintained a connection to campus, returning twice a year for English department board of visitors meetings. In spring 2017, he was eager to visit his old stomping grounds. He checked out the revamped Memorial Union and searched for a personalized brick that he purchased to commemorate all the hours he spent there.

Its inscription: Poetry written here.

As the editor of the literary magazine Rosebud, Rod Clark has published nearly 50 issues, despite the lack of a parent foundation or university to provide funding. Photo: Andy Manis.

Love of literature and disdain for most literary journals propelled Roderick (John) Clark ’71, a graduate in English and philosophy, to nurture an unconventional magazine called Rosebud. The experiment has lasted seventeen years and is still going strong.

After graduating from the Writers’ Workshop at San Francisco State University in 1975, Clark worked in the Madison area as a magazine writer and editor. He also wrote and directed experimental theater. One of his actors was ad man, writer, and poet John Lehman.

One day Lehman complained that his writing students had no place to publish. He broached the idea of a literary magazine. “And you have a half-million dollars?” Clark recalls asking. No, said Lehman, but surely they could do it. Says Clark, “It was as if someone had asked you to invent an antigravity machine.”

Nonetheless, they began brainstorming. “We started out talking about what we hated about most literary journals,” Clark recalls. “There was the stuffiness. There was the preoccupation with taking themselves too seriously. We wanted something that would be intelligent but not stiff. … We wanted to create a new kind of magazine that would appeal to readers as well as writers.”

Launched in 1993, the magazine (www.rsbd.net) was named with the mysterious word in Orson Welles’s film Citizen Kane. “The name suggests both innocence and worldliness,” says Clark, who took over nine years ago as Lehman moved on to other projects.

Rosebud always leads with Clark’s column and ends with a cartoon. In between are poems, stories, and essays arranged, as Clark says, by “tonal groups” that share a theme or more nebulous quality. Most Rosebud writers are relatively unknown, but the magazine has published pieces by Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Alice Walker, Norman Mailer, and other literary lights. The publication is “beautifully edited and designed,” says Ron Wallace, a poet and a UW-Madison professor of English. “I think it’s a terrific magazine, one of the best around.”

Among Rosebud’s hallmarks is a blurb accompanying each story or poem describing the origin of the piece or the author’s intention for it — “like a window into the interior landscape of the writer,” says Wisconsin poet Shoshauna Shy, whose work has appeared in the magazine. “I am always interested in the ‘backstory’ behind inspiration.”

Rosebud has been a shoestring operation since its inception. The nonprofit manages to break even through lots of poorly paid labor by Clark and art director Parnell Nelson, and by accepting donations. Clark must wait for the income from previous issues before he can print the next one, but despite the challenges, he manages to send four thousand copies of the triannual publication to eight hundred subscribers and nine hundred stores in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.

Clark has retired from other “magazinery” but continues to produce Rosebud from his one-hundred-twenty-year-old farmhouse near Rockdale, east of Madison. In the spring, he’ll publish his fiftieth issue.

“I get to sit out here and be a rural hermit, and at the same time have a connection with a much larger world,” he says. “That’s a lot of fun.”

Martín Espada was invited back to campus last spring to give a poetry reading. Photo: Bryce Richter

As his undergraduate career in Madison drew to a close, Martín Espada ’81 found himself simultaneously filling out applications for welfare and for law school.

The welfare forms were much more difficult, he says, because “they required me to document where I had been for years and years.” The others basically boiled down to one question: ‘Why do you want to go to law school?’ That answer was easy: to get off welfare.

Now Espada’s business card identifies his profession with one word: poet. He is also a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a member of the Massachusetts bar. Along the way, he has had many jobs. His colorful resume includes dishwasher, bouncer at Madison’s now-closed Club de Wash, door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, bindery worker in a printing plant, and patient advocate for the mentally ill, to name a few.

All of these positions have informed his understanding of the world. He grew up in a rough section of Brooklyn, New York, and in a working class town on Long Island, the son of a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother who converted to become a Jehovah’s Witness. As a Latino, Espada has felt the sting of racism and assaults on his dignity. And he inherited from his father, documentary photographer Frank Espada, “a set of political values and a sense of struggle.”

Widely considered a leading poet of his generation, Espada is unabashedly political in his life and letters. The cultural commentator Ilan Stavans calls him “a poet of annunciation and denunciation, a bridge between Whitman and Neruda, a conscientious objector in the war of silence.” Espada joins causes, heralds everyday heroes, chronicles the travails of the downtrodden, and casts his eye on world events. He also brings music to his cadences and revels in fresh and often surprising images and words. His appreciation for literature starts with content. “I am primarily interested in what people have to say, whatever the poet feels must be urgently communicated to the world,” he says during an interview in his home in Amherst.

Espada was in Madison last spring at the invitation of Steve Stern, the university’s vice provost for faculty and staff who is also a professor of Latin American history. Espada gave a reading attended by two hundred people and spoke with students about the influential Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, to whom he is often compared. Stern calls Espada “one of our most distinguished alums,” not only because of the prizes he has won and the fact that top publishers seek him out, but because of the Latin American tradition of melding politics and literature that he embraces with alacrity and profundity.

Espada’s Puerto Rican heritage is an important part of his identity. Yet his themes, often prompted by vignettes from his life, range widely. He has written about tending animals in the UW primate lab; the nightlife in San Juan seen through a historical and political lens; the cruelty of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile; the plight of evicted tenants; and the felling of the World Trade Center (see “Alabanza,” below).

Stern frames Espada’s importance in terms of the impact Latino authors have had on world literature over the last half century. “Latin America has historically been a region in which writers have not assumed a disconnect between a sense of political obligation to society and a sense of artistic drive and ethos,” he says. “We’re most familiar with that in the realm of novels and movies because of the presence of immigrant and racial themes.” Espada is widening that lens to include his art form, Stern says, adding, “We have failed perhaps to notice how powerfully this literary tradition has inflected poetry.”

Espada crosses cultural and artistic boundaries in ways that bring that ethos home to North Americans. Though his social conscience is obvious, he can’t be pigeonholed as a political or a Latino poet, because his devotion to his art defies such simple categorization. “I’m alien in two lands and illiterate in two languages,” he quips, referring to the fact that he did not master Spanish until he was an adult.

It was while working at a string of low-status jobs after high school that Espada was first inspired to begin writing poetry. He had noticed that he was essentially invisible to the bosses and customers he served. They would do and say things in his presence that were often astonishing for their insensitivity. Recalling his job pumping gas in Maryland, Espada still grimaces. “I can’t tell you the number of times someone would light up a cigarette standing next to me — I could have been blown sky high.”

Espada’s father, the documentary photographer Frank Espada, made many portraits of his children over the years. This one depicts Martín as he was about to leave for the University of Wisconsin. Photo: Frank Espada

In response, he took notes, becoming in his mind a “poet spy” on the doings of people who had an internalized sense of privilege. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we talk about the ‘invisible man’ as a trope in American literature,” says Espada with a nod to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 book of that title. “When you are a laborer, when you work with your hands, you are only seen for what your hands can do … and that can have its benefits if it so happens that you are writing things down.”

He came to Wisconsin, a state he had barely heard of and couldn’t locate on a map, on the strength of a passing comment by a high school English teacher, who said that it had a good university where he might have a realistic chance of being admitted in spite of lackluster grades during a false start at the University of Maryland. “I was one of those twenty-year-old kids who do what twenty-year-old kids do — they make momentous life decisions on impulse based on very little information,” he says. “I had no idea how cold it was — when I showed up, I didn’t have an overcoat; I didn’t even have boots.”

After arriving as a sophomore in 1977, somewhat to his surprise, Espada thrived academically, but he was forced to drop out after one semester due to lack of money. He went back to menial jobs for a year while establishing residency so he could pay in-state tuition. “I was like a rubber ball, bouncing in and out” of school, he says.

The university and the city shaped him in many important ways. At one point, he moved into an apartment in the building that housed WORT-FM radio, and soon he was spending late nights in his bathrobe spinning discs. “I did a lot of that — I was the mystery midnight programmer,” he says.

At the radio station, Espada developed a close relationship with fellow DJ and poet Jim Stephens, who was active in poetry circles. “Jim, to his eternal credit, was wildly enthusiastic about my work, and this was not a guy who was wildly enthusiastic about things as a rule. He was very laid back, as befits a jazz programmer,” Espada says. He gave his first reading of original work at Club de Wash. Through contacts Stephens gave him, Espada published the first of his seventeen books, The Immigrant Iceboy’s Bolero, in 1982 with Madison’s Ghost Pony Press. It is a collection of observations from his youth in New York illustrated with his father’s photographs.

Espada delved deeply into the history of U.S. domination of Latin America, choosing courses based on his passions. He decided to major in history when he tallied up his credits one day and saw that it offered the quickest path to graduation. Madison was “all about education,” says Espada. “By some miracle, some of the education actually happened on campus, and the rest happened in the street.”

He calls his time in Wisconsin “five of the most valuable years I’ve ever spent anywhere.” He became active in the Latin American solidarity movement, and he also happened upon Pablo Neruda’s work in a used book store on State Street, an encounter that would grow in meaning as his own poetic voice developed. It was a book with both the Spanish originals and English translations. “I read Neruda the way I still read, which is with one foot in each language,” he says.

Espada discovered his penchant for the law in what he calls “an accidental job” with the Wisconsin Bureau of Mental Health. He had been hired as a clerk soon after the legislature mandated that mental patients were entitled to a grievance procedure. After he began his new job, “the patient rights advocate quit and there was a hiring freeze on, so I became the patient rights advocate by default,” he says. “I had no legal training, I was twenty years old and in my first semester at UW, yet I was doing legal work representing committed mental patients at administrative hearings at hospitals throughout the state of Wisconsin.”

He got a second dose of paralegal experience toward the end of his time in Madison when he went to the Dane County Welfare Rights Alliance to obtain emergency food stamps for himself. He subsequently landed a job with the organization as an advocate for its clients.

But he credits his father and the late Herbert Hill, a former labor director of the NAACP and professor of Afro-American studies at the UW, for his ultimate decision to study law. Hill was a mentor who “saw something in me that other people didn’t see at the time,” Espada recalls. He applied to several law schools, and Northeastern University in Boston awarded him a full scholarship.

Throughout this time and then at law school, Espada never stopped writing poems. “I wrote about everything that was going on around me,” he says, and many of his experiences in Madison became grist for later work.

Espada learned more about social and legal priorities while representing poor people in Chelsea, a city in the Boston area with a large immigrant population. “When you are a tenant lawyer, what you are dealing with by definition is the legal system’s clear preference for property over people,” he says. His legal training sharpened his impulses to speak for those whose voices are rarely heard and refined the role that advocacy plays in his poetry.

His career as a lawyer also, as planned, lifted him out of chronic poverty. But while Espada was practicing tenant law in Boston, budget cuts put his job in jeopardy. Instead of playing hardball office politics to squeeze out a more junior member of the legal staff, he applied for an opening in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and began teaching there in 1993.

He and his wife, Katherine Gilbert-Espada, had a son, Klemente, who is now a high school senior. But several years ago, Gilbert suffered a massive stroke, and she has since been susceptible to debilitating seizures. Though they have insurance through his university position, all the attendant expenses of her illness have pushed Espada to spend more time on the road to give readings. “They pay me to go away,” he smiles ruefully.

The mementos Espada surrounds himself with in his home office include an envelope with the face of the poet Julia de Burgos exquisitely painted on the front. A gift from an inmate at a Connecticut prison where he gave a reading, it became the subject of a poem. There is also a platter honoring Espada as the 2007 winner of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award.

Espada’s paternal grandfather, Francisco Espada, planted a seed by reading nursery rhymes to the future poet at the family apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: Frank Espada

It is one of many accolades, including the Robert Creeley Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the American Book Award, two NEA Fellowships, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In his office there are also countless knickknacks. The short list includes a photo of a downed boxer; a bust of Charles Dickens; a vejigante mask, which is a Puerto Rican mythical figure that fuses elements of African, Spanish, and Caribbean cultures; and a political button for Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate who, Espada notes, won a million votes in his run for president of the United States from a jail cell.

Also in what he calls a “little museum that reflects the traveling life,” Espada keeps some of the cremated ashes of his dear friend and mentor Sandy Taylor, a co-founder of Curbstone Press and one of Espada’s early publishers.

Espada has never sought to banish sorrow from the things and people he surrounds himself with. On the contrary, he embraces pain with a spirit guided by the possibilities of his craft to clarify and heal. Of his approach to poetry, he writes:

“[T] he unspoken places in poetry [are] hidden or forgotten places and the people who inhabit them: prisons, psychiatric wards, unemployment lines, migrant labor camps, borderlands, battlefields, lost cities and rivers of the dead … poets continue to speak of such places in terms of history and mythology, memory and redemption, advocacy and art. They make the invisible visible.”

Eric Goldscheider is a freelance writer based in Massachusetts.