I fell in love with the art of poetry at the age of thirteen. As a high school freshmen, I walked into a poetry lounge run by Mike Sonksen and found a family of my peers. I found people that put pen to paper to express their experiences and their raw passion motivated me to express my own. I have always been a lover of slam poetry, and for a long time poetry was simply the way the words made me feel. I began writing free-verse poetry which was sometimes just a jumble of thoughts thrown onto a sheet of notebook paper. Then throughout my time at Kalamazoo College, I took poetry classes that challenged me to experiment with form which began to reshape my understanding of poetry. While my writing has changed tremendously over time, I’ve found that writing poetry is one part listening and two parts to “Just keep writing.”