Student Work

From a SpeakTogether virtual workshop, Talent Unlimited High School, Spring 2020

This poem was composed during a six-week session conducted by author and spoken word artist Sheri Booker, who worked with a class of 10th-grade students to develop their voices. This workshop took place during a global pandemic, a national lockdown, and uprisings across the country to end police brutality and structural racism. Read more about the works in this collection, which are artifacts of this period and a true testament to the vision, creativity, and resilience of these students.

Listen to a recording of the following poem above. 

The Book That Was Chosen

by Rose Macias

There was a boy who opened books
Whenever they opened,
He traveled inside a brown nook
He left the red door reopened
So the monsters broke and they took
The young boy who was roped
Against a long, low, thin, black hook
He was left unspoken
Boy braced before birds bolted books,
To the door unopened
The brave young boy ran and spoke shook
How could he have chosen
The wrong way out of the brown nook
There he was left frozen
The birds stared with a crooked look
The wrong book was chosen.

Rose Macias was a sophomore at Talented Unlimited High School in NYC at the time of this recording.