>> Jennifer Abella:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the National
Book Festival's Teen Stage. I'm Jennifer Abella, an editor
at "The Washington Post," a charter sponsor of the
National Book Festival. I love YA literature
and I cannot wait to hear from our next guest. Before we get started, I'd
like to thank our Co-Chairman of the Festival,
David Rubenstein, and other generous sponsors
who've made this fantastic event possible. If you'd like to add
your financial support, there's information
in your programs. We'll have some time after this
presentation for your questions. There are mikes in the
aisles and I've been asked to remind you that if
you go to the microphone, you will be included in the
videotape of this event, which may be broadcast
at a later date. It's my honor to
introduce Elizabeth Acevedo. Elizabeth is a DC-based writer and National Slam
Poetry champion. She has performed on
stages very close to here at the Kennedy Center and
as far away as South Africa. She published her
collection of poems, "Beastgirl & Other
Origin Myths" in 2016 and made her YA fiction debut,
"The Poet X" released in March. It's a novel written in verse
about a young girl in Harlem who discovers a love
for slam poetry. And a programming note, Elizabeth will be signing
books at 4:30 PM today. Please welcome to the
stage Elizabeth Acevedo. [ Applause and Cheering ] >> Elizabeth Acevedo: This is
for us writers, us readers, us girls who never saw
ourselves on bookshelves but we're still writing
poems when we talked and we've been called teeth
sucking, of snapping eyes, born bitter, brittle,
of tangled tongues, sandpaper that's been
origamied into girl, not worthy of being
the hero nor the author but we were also Medusa's
favorite daughters of serpent curls,
of hard-eyed looks, dreaming in the foreshadow,
we composed ourselves, since childhood taking
pens to our palms as if we could rewrite the
stanzas of life lines that tried to tell us we would
never amount to much. And when we were
relegated to the margin, we still danced bachata
in the footnotes. We still clawed our way onto the
cover, brought our full selves to the page, our every color
palette and bouquet of pansies, of big gold hoops of these
here hips and smart as quips and popping bubble gum kisses,
us girls who never saw ourselves on bookshelves but we're still
writing tales in the dark, as black and brown girls, brick
built, masters of every metaphor and every metamorphosis. Catch us with fresh manicures,
nail filing down obsidian stone and painstakingly
crafting our own mirrors and stories into existence. Good afternoon. How y'all doing? Y'all alright? [ Applause and Cheering ] I like to open with that piece because I think it creates an
umbrella for the impetus behind "The Poet X," that I'm
often asked, you know, why did you write this story,
what was the inspiration for this book about a young
Latin America in New York City who discovers poetry and has a
very contentious relationship with her mother. And the truth of it is that
I've been a writer my whole life but I never thought I
would write a novel. I was a poet. I was also a poet who was an
eighth grade English teacher in Prince George's
County, Maryland. [ Applause ] And the school that I
taught at was 78% Latinx. It was 20% Black. And I was told on my first day
of school by the vice-principal that I was the first
teacher they had ever had of Latinx descent
teaching a core subject. Right? And so I would
walk into class and the students would walk in
and they'd be like, "Oh, no, this is the wrong class." They try to walk out. I'm like, "Sit down." Right? They thought
it was Spanish. I'm like, "no." And I'm this space and although
I'm teaching eighth grade, a lot of my students are
very low-level readers. So they were fourth, fifth,
sixth grade reading levels, although they should've been
already reaching ninth, right, because we're trying to get
them ready for this next year. And I kept trying to
do everything I could to hook these students
into reading, right, that I fundamentally believed
that the reason that I am where I am is because I was a
veracious reader growing up. I was a reader before
I was a writer, that to me I found
answers in books. The things I couldn't
ask my mother, the things I couldn't
understand about my neighborhood or about why I was
treated certain ways, I looked to books for answers. And so I'm trying to like
this is the one key I have that I can maybe
give these students who reflect the same background and it's completely
being rejected. Right? Which if you're a
teacher, you know this is like the most heartbreaking
thing where you're like, this is my favorite book and you
hand it over and they're like, "I don't want this thing." You're just like, "No!" And I had this one student, Katherine Bolanos [assumed
spelling], who like if I was in eighth grade, we
would've been best friends but because I was her
teacher, I was like "Ah!" Like she was just
a tough cookie. And she was not where she needed
to be in terms of reading. And I'm like, alright, I'm
going to get her to be a reader. So I bring in "Twilight." I bring in "Hunger
Games," right. I bring in whatever book I could
bring and Katherine's like, "I don't care about
no sparkly vampires. I don't care about
none of this." And she said to me, "Where
are the books about us? How come we never read
any books about us?" And so I go out and
with my teacher budget, I buy Sandra Cisneros. I buy Meg Medina. I buy Matt de la Pena. I buy Jacqueline Woodson. Right? I buy Walter D. Myers. I bring all these stories
into class and this student, who had never been
a huge reader, within two weeks had
finished every book I put in front of her. Right? [applause] And
she goes, "Alright, Miss Ace, what's next?" I'm like, "What's next? That's it. That's my whole budget,
like we're done." Right? And also that there's so
little representative literature that I could actually hand
to her for that age group and that was the spark,
those two questions: Where are the books
about us and what's next. Right? And I love the quote
by Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop who inspired that first poem. All children's literature should
be a mirror, an opportunity to see yourself and a
window, an opportunity into an experience different
than your own and that that was my main idea. I want to show these students,
I want to show this community, I want to show my home girls,
I want to show where I grew up and I want to invite
folks to see themselves and also tell folks who
are like, I don't know if I like verse, I don't know where
Harlem is, what is a morenita, right, like here, learn a little
something about something other than what you already know. And so after my second year of
teaching, I decided I was going to go get my masters
in creative writing. And I walked into a program and I was the only
student of Latinx descent. I was the only student
of Afro descent. Right? I was often the
darkest person in the room, which being that I'm light
skinned is a problem. And I was the only person
who was born and raised in a major city and was
writing about that experience. And so I would turn in all these
poems, these hood morenita poems and I would get them back and
the slang would be circled and the Spanish would
have question marks. And I'm like, "You didn't
want to Google that? Like Google is free." I spent my whole life having
to Google all kinds of things because I don't come
from a background where this literature is
part of our tradition. And so there are many words
that I still don't know how to pronounce because
I've never heard them. There are many, many stories
that I have to go back and be like, "Well,
what does that mean?" Right? But when it came to my
work, I wasn't always afforded that same kind of
generosity from my readers. And I had this one professor
my first year of school who was an old school dude. Right? Walt Whitman in
the face, long-ass beard, the kind of person with
a real melodious voice. So anytime he'd talk,
he wanted to lean in. And he would say
something real problematic and you're like, "Lean back!" Right? That kind of professor. He came to class and he's like, "I just read the most
amazing poem about deer." And I have no beef with deer. I think venison is delicious. I'm not hating on
anybody's wildlife. But I think we often have
a stereotype about poetry, that it's about the clouds
and the flowers and the deer. And for two and a half hours, because grad school classes are
long, this professor goes on and on about this deer poem. And he goes one step further,
he says, "I want everybody in the room to write
an animal ode." Right? And he goes to one
classmate, he's like, "You know, what do you think
you'd write about?" And my classmate says,
"Well, like Elizabeth Bishop, I would write about
the blackbird, right, thirteen ways how to see
a blackbird is incredibly popular poem. And so in my head, I'm
like, "Well, you're writing into a tradition but I'm
not sure that's the most original answer." He goes to another classmate
and my classmate says, "Well, I would write about
sea anemones." And I'm like googling
and I say like, "What the heck is a sea anemone. Let me try to spell anemone." And then my professor gets
to me and the one piece of writing advice you always get
when you're in a writing program or when you're in
an English class or you've probably heard
this from your teachers is "write what you know." And so I puffed my chest
up and I'm like, "Well, I would write about rats." If you grow up in any major
city, you know you some rats. Right? You know, pigeons
are just rats with wings. Squirrels are just
rats with nice coats. We know them all. Right? And I feel like I'm on
Family Feud, like good answer, like I'm ready for my accolade. And my professor
looks at me and goes, "Rats are not noble enough
creatures for a poem. Liz, I think you need
more experiences." And I think both statements are
devastating in different ways. The idea that someone who
comes from a family that is from the Dominican Republic, which was the first
place colonized in the Western Hemisphere, colonized by Christopher
Columbus himself, by nobility, that that is what I'm
supposed to be writing towards. But then that second piece,
"you need more experiences," as if he knew absolutely
anything about my life or what I had lived
or the experiences that informed my work. And I think about this often
when I walk into a space and I'm working with
young people or I'm reading young
people's stories, what are the experiences
that I might discount that you are bringing into
a space, the knowledge that you already have
that I have to be open to, and what is the standard
that I'm comparing your work to because it might
not be the standard that is most appropriate for the
tradition you are writing into or about or maybe, maybe it's
never been written about before because the American
canon is very particular about who it allows
into its hallowed walls. Right? And so I have to
be mindful of that moment when I was an educator of what
do I take from this interaction with this professor
and what do I leave. Right? And I still
wrote that poem. It's called "Rat Ode." It's an official back
to that professor. But mainly it serves as
a reminder for any of us who have ever been told our
story is too small or too ugly or too different for
high art, that we are all of us deserving of poetry. And so if you will allow me, I
will recite that poem for you. [ Applause and Cheers ] And this is for all the rats in
the room [audience laughter]. To the rat, because you are
not the admired nightingale, because you are not
the noble doe, because you are not the
picturesque ermine, armadillo or bat, they have been written and I don't know their song
the way I know your scuttling between walls, the scent of
your collapsed corpse rotting beneath floorboards. Your frantic squeal as you pull
at your own fur from glue traps, ripping flesh from skin
in an attempt to survive because in July of '97, you
birthed a legion on 109th, swarmed from behind
the dumpsters, made our streets infamous for
something other than crack. Shoot, we nicknamed
you cat killer. Raced with you through open
hydrants, squeaked like you and [inaudible] blasted aluminum
bat into your brethren skull. The sound slapped down dominos. You reigned that summer rat, and even when they sent
exterminators half dead and on fire, you pushed on
because even though you are in an inelegant, simple
mammal bottom-feeder, always fricking famished. Little ugly thing who
feasts on what crumbs fall from the corners of our mouths,
you live uncuddled, uncoddled, can't be bought at Petco
and fed to fat snakes because you are not
the maze rat of labs, pale, pretty eyed, trained. You raise yourself, sharp
fangs, claws scarred, patch dark because of
this, he should love you. But look at the beast,
the poet tells me. The table is already full. And rat, you are not
a right worthy thing. Every time they say that take
your gutter, your dirt coat, filth this page, rat,
scrape your underbelly against street concrete. You better squeak and
raise the whole world, rat. Let loose a plague
of words, rat. And remind them that
you, that I, we are worthy of
every poem, here. [ Applause ] I think the best thing
my writing program did for me was reaffirm that
not everyone is my reader and that that is okay. But that does not mean that
I don't have a readership. I think it reaffirmed who
is it that I am writing for and what is it that I'm
trying to get across and that it might not be the
head of the English department and that that is okay. That whenever I'm asked
for writing advice, I say write your rats. Write the little ugly things, the markers of where you
are from, of who made you, of what makes you, and
that is what will resonate. That I could have decided to
write the poem that was going to get the most approval. I could have imitated the
poets that I knew the head of the department loved
or I could have said, I know the community
I'm trying to reach and I know the story
I'm trying to tell and that I honestly believe
in Toni Morrison's quote, write the book you've
most wanted to read. And as a huge reader,
I think a book like this would've
changed my life. And that's why I dedicated
myself to this novel. And I began writing this
novel as an MFA student who was working on a
thesis that was not in young adult literature and
that was not in verse novels. Right? So I'm like sneakily
on the side like working with this character without
knowing where this was going to end up, who was
going to read this, who wanted to read a verse novel about a Dominica
from like New York. I don't know, right? But like I trusted that if
nothing else, I would arrive to a closer truth
about my own story and my own inspiration
behind why I wanted to write. And that the main character in
this novel, I'm always asked, like, "Is it autobiographical?" And I'm like, "Not
if my mama's asking." Right? Like, pure fiction. But she is loosely based on
me, on young women I've known, on some of my closest friends. Right? She's a compilation
of a lot of different women. And so many of the
characters are that I pulled from all these folks I know
who I haven't seen on the page, I'm like, "I got to get
[inaudible] on the page, even if it's just his name,
even if it's just him opening up the hydrant, like,
I got get him there, because I would have loved
to see these cultural markers in a book one day, right. And so I'm going
to read from "X." How many folks have
read the novel? Oh, y'all adult, look at y'all. Yes. Those of you that
haven't, this is an intro. And those of you that have, you
can maybe hear it in my voice if you didn't get
the audio book. Xiomara Batista is 15 years old. She is coming from a very
conservative Catholic household. She developed very young. She got her period
when she was nine and so her body grew
very large, very quickly and she didn't know what to do with the attention
that it received. All of the sudden, she
is objectified in a way that she was not
prepared to deal with and she is taught
that it is her fault. It is her body. It is her fault. And all the things
that happen to her is because she is a
walking problem. And what a lot of
people don't know is that Xiomara is a secret poet,
that she has this journal that she writes all of
like her interactions in. And although she wouldn't
call herself a poet, she is processing the
world through poetry. When she's out in the world,
she's fighting with her fists. She is a quiet kid. She is walking machete. But in her journal, she's
allowed all of the metaphor and all of the language
to figure out what is it that I'm grappling with. And so I want to read just
a couple of pages for you to get a sense of how
Xiomara sees herself. I am unhideable, taller
than even my father with what mommy has always
said was a little too much body for such a young girl. I am the baby fat that settled
into D cups and swinging hips so that the boys who
called me a whale in middle school now ask me to send them pictures
of myself in a thong. The other girls call me
conceited, ho, thought, fast. When your body takes up
more room than your voice, you are always the target
of well-aimed rumors, which is why I let my
knuckles talk for me, which is why I learned to shrug when my name was
replaced by insults. I have forced my skin
just as thick as I am. Mina muchacha is
mommy's favorite way to start a sentence. And I already know I've
done something wrong when she hits me
with that look, girl. This time it's mina muchacha. Maria from across the
street told me you were on the stoop again
talking to los vendedores. Like usual, I bite my
tongue and don't correct her because I hadn't been
talking to the drug dealers. They had been talking to me. But she said she doesn't want
any conversation between me and those boys or
any boys at all. And she better not hear about
me hanging out like a wet shirt on a clothesline just waiting
to be worn or she will go ahead and be the one to ring my neck. [Inaudible], she asks, but
walks away before I can answer. Sometimes I want to tell her
the only person in this house who isn't heard is me. I'm the only one in the family
without a biblical name. Shit, Xiomara isn't
even Dominican. I know because I googled it. Clearly, my characters
are just as like enamored with googling as I am. Clearly traumatized. I know because I googled it. It means one who
is ready for war. And truth be told, that
description is about right because I even tried
to come into the world in a fighting stance,
feet first, had to be cut out of mommy after
she had given birth to my twin brother Xavier
just fine and my name labors out of some people's
mouths in that same awkward and painful way until I
have to slowly say Xiomara. I've learned not to flinch
the first day of school as teachers get stuck stupid
trying to figure it out. Mommy says she thought it was a
saint's name, gave me this gift of battle and now curses
how well I live up to it. My parents probably
wanted a girl who would sit in the pews wearing pretty
florals and a soft smile but got combat boots and a mouth
that's silent until it's sharp as an [inaudible] machete. "Pero tu no eres facil" is a
phrase I've heard my whole life. When I come home with
my knuckles scraped up, "pero tu no eres facil." When I don't wash the dishes
quickly enough or I forget to scrub the tub, "pero
tu no eres facil." Sometimes it's a good thing
like when I do well on an exam or the rare time I get an
award, "pero tu no eres facil." When my mother's pregnancy
was difficult and it was all because of me, because I was
turned around and they thought that I would die or worse
that I would kill her. So they held a prayer
circle at church and even Father Sean
[assumed spelling] showed up to the emergency room, Father
Sean who held my mother's hand as she labored me into the world and pappy paced behind
the doctor who said this was the most
difficult birth she had ever been a part of but
instead of dying, I came out whaling,
waving my tiny fist. And the first thing pappy said,
the first words I ever heard, "pero tu no eres facil." You sure ain't an easy one. [ Applause ] Thank you all. I want to make sure that we
have enough time for the Q&A. So I try to give a little
bit of my trajectory of how this book came about
and the different poems and arcs that informed that. But for me, the best part is
actually engaging with you all and the questions
that you might have. And so there are mikes on
these middle aisles here. I will not be saying
any more poems. That's it. Thank you so much for being here
and for spending time with me and thinking through
"The Poet X." If you have any questions
[applause] -- Oh, y'all are sweet. Thank you. [ Applause ] Thank you. We have about ten minutes. >> Hello. >> Elizabeth Acevedo: Hi. >> My question is
about somebody I know who is an incredibly talented
writer and spoken word poet but has never published,
entered her poetry into any competitions. What kind of advice would you
give to somebody like that to lift their writing
off the ground? >> Elizabeth Acevedo:
I think I would -- First, my instinct is to complicate what you're
asking me a little bit. Right, that we live in a world where if your letters
are not printed, we assume that they are not
being held to the same regard as something that is published. Right, that I always
felt this huge anxiety that because I was primarily
known as a spoken word artist or a slam poet or a
performer and I'm doing quotes because I think that these
are very complicated terms or I'm a poet who reads out loud
pretty well, right, I think, and I come from a
tradition of oral poetry. And so I uplift that
at all times. And so if this person is walking
in a stance of I want to be in the room when
the poem is heard and poems should
always be heard, right, that whenever someone's like
I don't get poetry, I'm like, "Have you read it out loud
because that's a game changer." That maybe they are not
interested in publishing. I also believe that if you are
not someone who reads widely and who is reading poetry, it's
going to be incredibly difficult to publish poetry because
what journals do you send to if you're not sure
what journals are in conversation with your work. If you're not sure what poets
are on the same thread as you, to just hold it as an accolade
of I want the publishing credit, if that is not the vein
that you want to be in, I think what we have
to do is deconstruct where we say the
writer should go, right, or deconstruct what we think
of as the upliftment of poetry. However, if this is a poet who
feels like they have been pushed to the side and like, well,
maybe publishing isn't for me, that's what other people do. We don't do that. I don't do that. I can only be on a stage, I think that that is a very
different approach, right, because that's oftentimes a fear
of the rejection of academia, of a fear of the canon and that
right now we're an incredible moment where so many
different kinds of voices are being published,
specifically within poetry, right, that that's so -- Like the Ruth Lilly was just
announced and I mean all of the poets are poets of color. Right? And that to me
was an incredible moment of the different backgrounds,
gender nonconforming, right, like we had all kinds of
diversity represented there, so I think it's about
finding your readership. Going back to the rat poem,
like who are the people that are already on
the same page with you and sending your poems there
and starting small, right. That I started kind of with
homies, like I knew a homie who was editing a
journal and I'm like, alright, here's my poem. And like you have to take
it because you love me. And the circulation of that
journal was pretty small but it just gave me
the confidence of okay, a poem of mine is
out in the world. It's on the Internet and
this is an incredible thing and I'm not there to
mitigate how it's being read and maybe that's okay. And so I think it's about
just encouraging your friend to release and maybe finding
where their poem is going to be most well received. Great question. >> Hi. First of all,
you're amazing. >> Elizabeth Acevedo:
Oh, thank you. Very sweet. Thank you. >> Huge fan. I'm a poet and as I was going through my college application
process, everybody was like, oh, you're going to writing school. And I was like, nope. But the reason why I
think, I think a lot of the reason why didn't apply
to creative writing schools was because of listening to
experiences like you had. And as a writer of color, my
question is what would you say to young poets, especially
young poets and women of color who don't want to
enter or are afraid to enter academic writing
programs because of the lack of acceptance of our stories
and what advice would you give if somebody was interested
in doing that but didn't know how to? >> Elizabeth Acevedo: Right. Thank you for that question. I hope college applications
were okay. Right? Hey, you better get it. Howard contingency in the front. Congrats. I think that whenever
you're walking into spaces where you already know like this
space has been traditionally blank, you have to be
incredibly purposeful with what you are trying
to get from that space. And if what you're trying to
get from that space is approval, you've already failed. And that was probably the
biggest lesson I had to learn. No one was going to be able
to give me enough approval in any single program to make
me feel confident enough to work into the world, right. It was always scary. I always feel like a fraud. I continuously have
imposter syndrome because it's just the way that
we have been programmed to exist in these spaces of we are
not worthy to be here. And you have to do
it anyways, right. But that there was never going
to be a stamp of approval and I couldn't look for it
because I would've been crushed that first semester if I had. Right? And so when you're
applying, you kind of just have to go for like the best of
the worst in all honesty because I think the programs that we have right
now are geared in a very particular
direction and workshops in general are looking
for a thing, right, that I think the programs that are allowing the most
eclectic thought processes or they're very few
and far between. And so you kind of have to go in knowing what do I
want from this thing. Do I want to have the
space to read widely? Do I want to find maybe
one or two cohort members that I can share work
with in the future? Do I want to work with
this particular professor? That you can't go in being
like I want a Disneyland of creative writing because
that is not going to happen. But if you are very specific
about what you want to do in that space, I went
in like I'm going to come out with a book. That didn't really
happen but having that intention I think kept me
very focused on no one is going to sway me from creating
a piece of writing that I feel has my heart in
it by the end of this program. And I left with a
[inaudible] book, right. And so I think that that is
what you have to do in any of these spaces and that
probably speaks to both of your questions, I think. But I want to go back to
what you said about going into a program that wasn't about
creative writing, that I think that that's even more
adventurous and exciting, right, don't study writing. Like what if you
studied something else and that inform the writing, that so often people think
they need a writing degree or they need to go to a
specialized high school in creative writing
or they have to like and I think that
you live, right. The MFA programs are very recent
phenomenon, right, for the last like 45 and some
odd change years. But before that, people
were doctors and engineers and garbage men and then they
wrote on the side and that that to me is so [inaudible]
to allow yourself to figure out what is the best thing
that's going to feed my writing and let that guide you, not just
what you think you have to do in order to follow
the steps, right, because writing is not
engineering and you can't -- There's no like blueprint to how
you become this kind of thing. You live and you keep
writing and you read widely and you figure out what
space you need to feed that. Thank you and good luck
with your semester. >> Hi. I also teach
middle school. Yay! And I teach creative
writing in middle school and I've already got plans
to use all kinds of things that you've said
in my classroom. But your rat poem story
really spoke to me because I spend a lot of time
trying to convince seventh and eighth graders that
they have something to say and then I don't want
them to fill in the blanks of a five paragraph essay the
way think they think they're supposed to do it. So I have two questions. One, if you have any
inspirational words for my students, I would love
to share those with them. And two, I would like to know
how you did on that rat poem. What grade did you get? >> Elizabeth Acevedo:
I think the -- I don't know if it's
words of inspiration but I hope your students
whatever task they take on, they take on with empathy,
right, even if it's like a math problem, like
whatever it is that I hope that that is as much a
part of their curriculum or how they're moving
through the world. Right, like where am
I practicing empathy, did I practice empathy
today because I think that that is how we
build a better world. I turned in the poem and
my thesis at the very end and he couldn't remember
the interaction, which I found hilarious and
a little bit sad, right. But for him it was like,
where did this poem come from. And I'm like, "You, bro, you!" And yet here we are, right,
we say things all the time and we don't realize how they
resonate and that's okay. So, thank you for that. I'm going to try
to be very quick because I know we only
have a couple minutes. >> Okay, so this is kind
of a two-part [inaudible], so I'll keep it --
So the first part, you kind of already answered. So you can maybe keep
it a little short, this idea of transitioning
and going back in the elitism that happens sometimes
between the spoken word world and the creative, the page
poetry world and I remember when I started writing,
I was writing on the page and they were like, "Don't
look at the spoken word poets. That's bad." But I think that we can
learn a lot from a lot of great spoken words poets,
like, you know, Patricia Smith, for example, for you and I
wanted you to first of all talk about what you've
learned from each world that maybe we can teach each
other and then also just talk about your writing
process in general as like the second
part of my question. >> Elizabeth Acevedo: I think
in terms of what we can learn, I feel like the community
that primarily comes up through spoken word is
looking towards the rest of the world, right, but
they're looking at it as like we are the misfits. We don't fit into
these programs. But oftentimes we've
already been exposed to poetry in school. We've been exposed
to poetry in class. We may not always understand it. We may struggle with
connecting to it but there is exposure
there, right. And so I think I would speak
less to that side of it because often that's a side
that's coming from rejection. I turned to this form of
poetry because it's the one that felt the most like home. Right? But I think in terms
of what the flipside, right, you know, Patricia Smith is
funny because I don't think -- I think she would agree with me. She is a poet who has performed. That's what she would say. Right? Like people should just
be better readers of their work. Like literally we engage every
day with other human beings and we figure out how to make
them understand and then you get on a stage and you're awful
at reading your own work. Right? And I guess
people don't want to fall into being an entertainer but
it's like if you wrote this with love and passion
and emotion, how do you now bring
that through. And I had a professor
who told me like a reader should
be a blank slate. I was like that sounds awful. Right? And so I hope that both
sides go to different kinds of readings in order to
engage with one another and see the work
that they're doing. I am being told to
wrap it up and I want to respect the time and space. Justina Ireland is
going to be coming into this room in ten minutes. You should stay for her. She is freaking fantastic. Or you should come and get
your book signed by me. Those are your options. The folks who are waiting to
get on the mike, I'm going to be over here if you want to just
come chat with me real quick. Thank you so much
for being beautiful, beautiful audience
[applause and cheers]. I appreciate you.
