GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Once a week, a group of students at Southwest Community Campus take their lunch into the library and open up their notebooks — revealing a world they often keep separate from school.
The students are in week five of a six-week course put on by teachers from The Diatribe, a Grand Rapids-based nonprofit. The goal of the class is to encourage students to express themselves through poetry and spoken word.
The Diatribe's Rachel Gleason and Marcel "Fable" Price are leading the SCC group and began the course by bringing in artists and poets and discussing topics like gentrification, mental health, the LGBTQ community and bullying. They then prompted the students to share their perspectives on paper in the weeks to follow.
The middle school students' poems range from tales about their love for their families to their painful struggles with depression. Many students choose to share their poems out loud and are met with snaps and cheers for their courage.
"It's really encouraging to me to see this next generation of young people talking about these issues, and using writing to navigate the things that they are going through in their own lives and the issues they see in the world around them," Gleason said.
The Diatribe started out as a collective of artists six years ago. They created a blind- and deaf-friendly ArtPrize exhibit that included several pop-up shows a day.
"We had a ton of teachers and students come," said Price, who is the group's executive director. "And educators were like 'have you ever thought about bringing this to schools?', and we were like 'no.' At the time we were all hooligans and nightlife entertainers."
The nonprofit's education journey started at 54th Street Academy in Wyoming where they volunteered for several years. Now, they are working in 20 to 30 schools a year. They can provide all their programming for free thanks primarily to grants from the Wege Foundation, Grand Rapids Community Foundation and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and Fountain Street Church.
The Diatribe will host their second annual poetry show "The Grand Showcase" on Saturday, Nov. 23 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Fountain Street Church.
Rudy Fransciso, a national poet, will headline the show, along with Ebony Stewart, Britteney Black Rose Kapri and six of Michigan’s most talented spoken word artists. Six local students will kick off the event with their work.
"It is truly a once in a lifetime experience, people will never get to see these artists together in one room," Price said. "It's also very intentional. All the vendors are businesses from within the community and are black and brown owned businesses."
To learn more about The Grand Showcase, click here. To learn more about bringing The Diatribe to your school, click here.
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