February 2009
I didn’t expect her to sound like that.
It was her voice that made me feel that I was truly in the presence of an artist. Of course I had read her poetry, and I had seen her headshots on the dust jackets of all her books, but meeting her made her real in a way that her poems could not. She is a petite woman, maybe 5’2” at the most, with her long hair pulled back into a braid at the nape of her neck, and I was alarmed to hear a deep voice booming out of her frame.
For me, reading texts that I love is a highly personal experience, and reading Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry was no different. I find that when I become very familiar with any text—an interesting article, a novel, but most particularly poetry—I hear the words as though they were spoken by my own voice. To hear this author read her poems aloud brought her work alive in a way that I never could have imagined.
Moffet 5th graders listen to Ms. Nye
Her voice resonated across the auditorium of the North Philadelphia classroom where Al-Bustan does much of its programming, and it transfixed everyone in the audience, immediately focusing a room of third to fifth-graders who had been squirming in their seats just moments before she stood up. For an hour, Ms. Nye encouraged her young audience to write, holding up a small notebook and saying “this is all a writer needs to go to work.” She spoke to her young Hispanic and Arab audience about the wonderful aspects of living in a vibrant multicultural neighborhood such as theirs.
Ms. Nye’s visit to Philadelphia in February reaffirmed why I have entered Americorps for a second year: in my work, I get to bring high-caliber artists and their work to under-served communities. Artists such as Naomi Shihab Nye leave inspiration in their wake, and the sense of hope and celebration was tangible in the room as she left to a standing ovation.
- Chloe Tucker, Program Assistant
