This fall I spoke with listeners at the Twin Cities Book Festival about the place of poetry in their lives.

This week we're sharing their stories. worries. and half in Baltimore, Maryland. I'm super lucky because poetry is a huge part of my daily life in my daily practice.

I am a poet and I love to just write poems to my friends, to my grandma,

to the natural world around me I write in and out of Italian into

English so that everyone that I love can read my poems so in my daily

practice it's really just a nourishing way of telling someone that you love them and that you're thinking about them and what they mean to you in your life and how they create a network of joy around you.

I started with small rhymes in Italian. My dad's from Italy and

so I was always raised bilingually and it felt like a touchstone to

understanding a culture that I couldn't live in is I got these poems that my dad

would recite in elementary school because it was part of their tradition in Italy to

recite fundamental poems and so they kind of became a prayer in like a way that I could connect to a place

that I couldn't be in presently all the time and then in high school shout out to my

12th grade English teacher, Mika Hopkins, who taught me basically that it is a

space that you can enter in. She taught me that I could also write creatively. I didn't just

have to recite things that came before me. I love the ways that poets gather us together

around that fire and tell stories and acknowledge their lineage and speak to that and also speak to the

future and I think that literary events like the one that we're at right now is how we get

people excited about poems off the page and really remember that it was always an oral

tradition and that being said I think that I love also seeing things

on the page and the ways that we get to invent language

as poets and reconstruct it and then challenge people

to say, hey, read this poem that might look all over the page

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