Detroit — Just above a barbershop at the intersection of Cadillac Boulevard and East Forest Avenue in the East Village of Detroit sits a message high in the sky for any passerby to see: “Love me like a soda that loves to sizzle.”
In the corner of the billboard, the attribution reads, “Gabrielle, Poet.”
Across the street, fifth grader Gabrielle Walk clutches a book and a microphone attached to a portable speaker and reads her poem in full out loud. It’s a ballad about unconditional love, the kind inherent to a being.
“Love me like a clock that loves to tell time,” she reads. “Love me like the sky loves to be blue. Love me like a soda that loves to sizzle.”
Gabrielle is a poet, and thanks to InsideOut Literary Arts, her words and the words of 11 other Detroit students are now on display for the world to see.
The Detroit nonprofit partners with area schools to help broaden their literary curriculum, bringing in writers-in-residence to show students that their words and thoughts matter.
And nothing drives that point home more than seeing their work plastered on a billboard in their community, Executive Director Suma Rosen said.
“It’s like, ‘Don’t tell me you care about me. Show me you care about me,'” Rosen said.
For the last five years, the organization has used grant funding from the Miami-based Knight Foundation to purchase billboard space in Detroit to display lines of students’ poetry.
This week, the organization held its second-annual bus tour of four of the billboards. In front of each, the student whose work was looming over the crowd read the full poem aloud.
“Just to watch a young person stand in front of a billboard, and a line from their poetry is, like, up in the sky behind them, and they’re sharing their original words, and the whole world is looking at them, it’s so cool,” Rosen said.
Gabrielle was nervous to read her poem in front of people, but said it made her proud to see her words published in such a public place. She didn’t know it was happening until her dad brought her to the spot and told her to look up.
“I was just telling her, her hard work pays off,” said Gabrielle’s dad, Andre Walk. “And then we pull up to the light, and I was like, ‘You want to see how your hard work pays off?'”
Gabrielle was “super shocked,” he said.
“I wasn’t expecting it to be on a billboard,” she said.
Gabrielle said she didn’t know she liked poetry until working with InsideOut this semester at her school, Cesar Chavez Academy.
“Whatever comes into my mind, I can just write it,” she said.
Her dad said Gabrielle has always been writing, but the program gave her the outlet to turn it into poetry. Seeing her work published, let alone on a billboard, he said, made him so proud he cried.
“It is super cool for the kids, because the motivation as a kid — it gives you hope,” Walk said. “You know that your work is not going unnoticed.”
The idea to put students’ work on billboards was the brainchild of InsideOut’s director of school and community partnerships, Alise Alousi.
The organization publishes students’ work in a book every year, she said, but “the reach of a billboard is just so much more immense.”
“Even as, like, an adult writer, there’s no better feeling than feeling like, somebody’s reading my words,” Alousi said. “Somebody’s paying attention to what I have to say. So I think it’s a really beautiful thing.”
Rosen, the executive director, said she hopes the community that sees the billboards will feel “awe,” “joy” and “respect” from seeing students’ work in their neighborhoods.
“Maybe take a moment and, like, appreciate that you had a moment with art and poetry, change your life, even for only five seconds,” she said. “And also that kids did that.”
For a list of where to find all the billboards, go to insideoutdetroit.org.
jpignolet@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Detroit student poets see their work on 12 billboards across the city
Reporting by Jennifer Pignolet, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
