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Anyone who wishes to contact me may reach me at my personal email address (tugboatsketches@yahoo.com), my Kent State email address (ehall14@kent. edu), or my LiveJournal (http://cloudeighteen.livejournal.com).
If I were asked the specific point at which I realized that I wanted to be a writer, or even a poet, for that matter, it would be difficult for me to answer definitively—I could say that ever since I wrote a book of poetry along with my second grade class and even wrote short stories for a class assignment in the fourth and fifth grades, I have loved to write poetry and write creatively. I could say that in my freshman year of high school, when I would use the free time I had in each day to spend writing poetry so that I had written nearly 270 poems over the course of a year, and I could say the year before that, I had written just as many poems, if not more. However, I believe it was my participation as one of the students honored in the Wick Poetry program that came to my middle school—Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts—as a seventh grader in Mrs. Skidmore’s language arts class and as an eighth grader in Ms. Wolak’s language arts class, that truly sparked my interest in becoming a poet as well as the satisfaction derived from my being able to write poetry as a means of self-expression and enjoyment for others as well as myself. I am not only pleased with how the Wick Poetry Center has coincidentally appeared in my life and has me irrevocably convinced that I should be a writer, and a poet at that, but because it has come back into my life so many times, not only with the scholarship opportunity, but with more opportunities to write what I love and write it well, I am determined to do anything I can to be able to actively participate in the programs offered by the Wick Poetry as a future student at Kent State University and as a member of the Honors College there. I am very excited and honored to have received the scholarship award from the Wick Poetry Center and look forward to participating in the Giving Voice outreach program in the near future, thus coming full circle from when I was a participant in 2004--never could I have imagined that I would be able to manifest my dream of being able to come back and teach poetry for the very same program that helped me find my voice through my pen and my heart.
In my experience, poetry can express every emotion we cannot articulate or emote ourselves, whether in prose or in general discourse, and in this way, poetry can be uplifting, surprising, amusing, and entertaining among other things, and it can cause us to take a good, hard look at our lives and realize what we could better and, inversely, what we could have done worse, but luckily did not do. Poetry can also introduce us to both common and uncommon experiences with universal themes such as coming of age, love, loss, success, the struggle to overcome negative or challenging obstacles, and discovering the difference between who we are and what we can be—poetry gives insight to the souls, hearts and minds of the poets themselves, and I like to think that with each poem that I write, I leave part of myself that is mysterious, different, or unknown behind so each reader can see part of me that no one else can see, and over the years, it is clear to see how much I have discovered and revealed about myself, my style, and my method of expression. Poetry can also be didactic, but not in the academic sense, in that it presents universal experiences and emotions, but also in the lessons that we consequently learn from what they have to offer, which vary as much as the perspectives of the readers who glean knowledge from such poems. As a poet, I want to convey these ideas indirectly with my poetry and use what I have learned from writing poetry to teach everyone I can about how poetry feeds the soul, gives us all reason to believe we are all connected by similar, life-changing experiences, and that all of us can become something greater than anyone can expect of us with the right kind of attention, awareness, and devotion to the improvement of ourselves and our lives. More than anything, it gives us, and especially me, the right to do what we love and not just what is required or practical, it flexes our creative muscles, and gives us an escape and something to look forward to when it seems as though nothing else is left. It has been a part of my life for so many years that I cannot bear to substitute its beauty and eloquence for any other art form—I have truly fallen in love—and thus I am forever and always a poet.
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