Sarah Kay is a performance poet. She is also an advocate and activist who has done (like any poet worth her salt) plenty of soul searching. That journey brought her to the TED stage, in a video you can watch by clicking this image right here.
Sarah Kay is involved with Project VOICE, which "is dedicated to promoting empowerment, improving literacy, and encouraging empathy and creative collaboration in classrooms and communities around the world."
She has collaborated on books that fuse her poems with illustrations, such as "B", which you can get from the library as soon as I'm done with it. You'll find a whole collection of her poems in "No Matter the Wreckage", but I've got that one right now, too.
A recent interview on Brain Pickings with Maria Popova includes this exchange;
"MP: And this brings us back to the legitimacy question — if making a living isn’t the metric of success in creative work, if academic credentials aren’t it, then what is? What is your internal barometer for your own legitimacy?
SK: Oof, that’s a big question."
What is your internal barometer for your own legitimacy. Oof.
Sarah Kay writes the types of poems that gain a new flavour in the mouth of the reader. Here are a couple readings by the author to savour, as we edge ever-nearer to Poetry Month.