 to celebrate the power, the audacity, and the necessary governance of young women in our culture, especially young women of color who've been fighting these battles for far too long. Kate Schatz and illustrator Miriam Kline-Stahl are illuminating these women in their series of short biographies, Rad American Women A to Z, Rad Women Worldwide, and their newest just published The Summer in which we're celebrating tonight, Rad Girls Kent. From the Bay area where she writes, teaches, speaks, and resists. She's the co-founder of Solidarity Sundays, a nationwide network of feminist activist groups of which there is a member group in Montpelier, and which is how Kate and I initially connected. As an educator, Kate has worked with a wide range of age groups for over 15 years. She taught women's studies, literature, and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz, San Jose State, Rhode Island College, and Brown University. She developed and led creative writing workshops for middle school students as part of Ailey Camp, a youth program run by the Alvin Ailey Foundation. And she's the former chair of the School of Literary Arts at Oakland School for the Arts where she taught fiction, poetry, and journalism to nine to 12th graders for many years. Now she shares the Rad Women books with students ranging from Kate through college on a regular basis. Kate has brought some very special guests with her whom she will introduce very soon. But first, before we go any further, I'd like to invite a very intelligent and saddy Rad Girl who lives amongst us up to the podium, or not podium, depending what you want to do. Hope Pretraro is a junior at Montpelier High School who grew up amongst the incredible diversity of New York City before moving to our practically all-white state. Wanting to integrate the rich culture she grew up in with her new home, she's been working hard along with fellow students to find ways to connect people through encouraging actions and conversations about race and privilege. Hope is the founder of the annual Race Against Racism that's happening this September at Montpelier High School. Thank you for joining us tonight, Hope. My name is Hope Pretraro. I'm 16 years old and I'm becoming a junior at Montpelier High School this fall. I faced trials and tribulations myself, especially as a changemaker, not just in politics or social justice, but in being the master of my own destiny. To tell you a little bit about myself, I was raised by a single mother who's gotten her college education while raising me. In New York City, a place where culture is really rich and a place that's really really different from Vermont. If you asked me what has had the biggest impact on my life, a few words would come to mind. Socioeconomic status, gender, race. As I've grown older, I've grown more aware of the dynamics of privilege. I've had to grapple a lot with how my own life has been shaped by what I didn't choose, by what I couldn't choose. That applies to everyone in this room. To me, success is the ability to define yourself in spite of this. To understand that circumstance shapes you, but it doesn't have to make or break you. So, my journey to activism has sort of been like ever since I was a kid. I was always trying to be the good Samaritan. I went to Catholic school and always like do what I could to help my classmates and my peers, but it didn't really solidify until I moved to Vermont. When I did move to Vermont, I sort of suffered from culture shock because it was very very different from the home I'd grown up in, but it also taught me a lot through living, through having to learn a little bit more about a different culture and a different state. I also learned about how to define myself, not by the place I was raised in or lived in, but by my own beliefs and principles and values, and gradually I began to wear them like a badge of honor. When I did move to Vermont, I noticed that my community was very white and that there weren't really conversations on race and diversity. I felt out of place because I really wanted to start discourse or continue the ongoing discourse in our nation right here, and for a while I didn't really know what to do and I sort of just, I don't know, I just felt really sad, but then as I became more adjusted to Vermont, I started to equate myself with activist circles and I started learning more about Vermont politics as well, and it's a great place to live now for me, and I was told when I first moved here to join a lot of clubs and to volunteer as much as I could, and so upon entering high school, I volunteered, I started volunteering for the Vermont Democratic Party, which I think changed my life a bit because I sort of like knew about politics and political issues, but I never really wanted to equate myself with them and to equate myself with legislation and policy, and never knew how I myself could sort of impact my community even as a student, but I made phone calls, I visited people's homes and knocked on doors, and I helped set up for rallies, and it was November 7th when I realized as the results were coming in, I was in Burlington at a Vermont Democratic Party event, and I thought to myself, I could be a politician, I could do this one day, this is a world I want to be in, and I think that's a really powerful thing, especially as a young woman of color in society, and I knew that I had to sort of use this as a stepping stone for something more, and so I joined the Racial Justice Alliance at Montpelier High School, and this past year we were the first public secondary institution to raise the Black Lives Matter flag. I also joined activist clubs and climate justice groups at my school, and they're all run by youth, and it's been an amazing experience, and for the Black Lives Matter flag raising, we showed the movie The Thirteenth, which is a documentary about racial justice and racial injustice in America today, and we got the whole school involved for an educational experience, and it was something that I had been craving ever since I moved here, and to finally get my peers involved, and to teach my peers, and to have them join us in the fight for racial justice was really, really meaningful, and then I decided to found the Race Against Racism, which happened in September of last year, and is happening again this year, and I think it was really eye-opening to have to plan an activist event, but it also helped me get acquainted with activist circles around Vermont, and it was a way for me to make a public statement to my community that racial justice is important, and it's right in the capital, so even politicians could see, and we had speakers and performers, and we raised money for migrant justice and justice for all of Vermont, and I think that over the past two years, how I've grown is because of the moments where I've said, okay, this is what it is, but how can I change it? And so I became a legislative intern, and there's just a lot that I've done, and I've seen the youth around me do a lot of amazing things, like when people will ask me, oh, what inspires you the most? Who inspires you the most? And the first thing I think of are my peers, because every single day they're doing absolutely amazing things, whether it's in sports or activism or the arts, and yeah, I think that sort of summarizes my journey to activism in Vermont, and every day I try to be more involved, and I found a community here, which I think is really, really important, and it's how I've met Muslim girls making change, and a lot of great activists and students from around the state, so yeah, I think that, as I said before, activism has always been a part of me, and I think that activism is a sea that's sewn from the day you're born, because what you fight for is very often what's denied of you, and every single day I know that I'm fighting for something important, and I know that the youth in Vermont and the youth nationwide are fighting for something that's very, very important, and so yeah, that's it. Hope, you probably hear this a lot, but you are very aptly named. Thank you so much, there's hope, it's like so cheesy, I feel lame even saying that, but like there really is hope, that gave me a lot of hope, and I mean that's pretty much why we wrote the book that we did, this book, Rad Girls Can, because my illustrator, Miriam Kleinstahl, who says hello, she's in California, she wishes she could be here, but we know that there are so many incredible stories, and there's so much power in youth, and that's the engine behind so many of our amazing movements, so thank you. Thank you so much, you just like made me flash back to my teenage activism so much. I was like phone banking for the Green Party when I was 16, long ago, it was like me and a bunch of 80-year-old awesome women, they were so excited to have me. All right, so my name is Kate Schatz, and I'm the author of these books, and I'm super excited to be here in Vermont. I was soaking wet in a rainstorm in a lake nearby about an hour ago, but I dried off in the car, and my hair is still a little damp, but I love swimming in your beautiful lakes in this lovely state. I'm really glad to be here, I've never, this is my first time in your wonderful state capitol, so thank you Montpellier. I was saying to my kids in the car that I think that, you know, I was one of those kids that memorized all the state capitals, and like that was a big deal, I could recite them over dinner, so I'm like, I've known about Montpellier forever. I know it. My dad would be like, Vermont, Montpellier, I got it. But so I'm really glad to be here, and I'm mostly excited to be joined by some amazing people that you're going to be hearing from. We have one of your state representatives, Selena Colburn here, and we have Valkisa, Lena and Hawa from the Muslim Girls Making Change, who are no big deal on the cover of our book. Yay! Which, you know, before we have a lot to talk about tonight, and we have a lot to go over, but I wanted to say about your work at your high school and the raising of the Black Lives Matter flag, which is something that I read about in like a CNN viral article, because that went pretty viral after that happened, and actually I organized our Solidarity Sundays chapters across the country to send letters of support to your school thanking you guys, so we have a nice connection there. But like, why does that matter? Why is raising that flag matter, right? Because it's about visibility. It's about so many things, but part of, and I've actually been doing a lot of TV appearances on this book tour, and I've been wearing my Black Lives Matter t-shirt on all of my TV appearances, because I have a big platform on TV. I'm going to wear that t-shirt, because visibility matters, and raising that flag matters, and wearing the t-shirt matters, your bumper stickers matter, but also we know that the cover of our book matters, so it was really meaningful to us when we talked to our designer. I was like, I want to put this beautiful image of these young women on the cover of this book. They're looking happy, they're excited, they're young, and I want to have young Muslim women wearing head coverings on the cover of our book, looking awesome and happy, and that kind of visibility was important to us in our books. It's important to us in the pages of our books. It's important to Miriam, who's not here, but yeah, so thank you guys. Thank you. Thank you all for being here. So this is the third book in the Rad Women series. The first book was Rad American Women A to Z that came out in 2015, I think, and I got the idea for that book when my daughter was about two years old. She is much older than two now. She's upstairs. Is she still upstairs? She's like so done watching my book events. She's just like, she's reading Harry Potter upstairs, but I was thinking about the kind of books that I would want her to read when she was older. What did I want to share with her? What kind of stories and information and histories did I want her to encounter? And I thought about what kind of books would I have wanted to read when I was a kid? And I loved reading about strong, adventurous, cool women when I was a kid, and at the time she was two, so we had a lot of A to Z books. It was like, A is for Apple, and A is for Alligator, and it popped into my head, what if I did an A to Z book about women from history? And it kind of went from there. And the idea grew and grew and grew, finally did it, turned into a book, very unexpectedly became a bestseller, and it's delightfully taken over my life in a very exciting way. We followed it with Rad Women Worldwide, which tells stories of women from all over the world. And then, again, we followed that with this book, which focuses on 50 stories of girls who have done something remarkable before the age of 20. And the idea for this book really came from our readers. So we do a lot of school visits and assemblies and presentations all over the place, and kids love to give us ideas for future books, and sometimes they're really ridiculous and silly, like, you should do a book about rad dogs, which is not ridiculous. That's a fine idea. But the one that we heard the most was, can you do a book about girls, or can you do a book about young people and people my age? And that was actually really intimidating at first as an idea. It's very different to research contemporary, young, awesome people than it is to research historical figures who have books written about them, and they're scholars who've researched their lives. Even if they're relatively obscure, there's more information out there. But we really realized that that was a book people wanted. And again, as we thought about who really drives change and hope and activism in this country, it is young people. And then in the wake of the election, we were like, oh yeah, this is obviously the book that we want to do, and these are the stories we want to tell. I think the hardest thing about creating this book was knowing when to stop, who to include, and we had to stop somewhere, right? But it's like, every time I thought I knew exactly who we were going to be writing about, someone would send me an article about some amazing teenager who invented a really cool thing. And I'd be like, no, I want to have her in the book. So that was probably the most challenging part. We're going to do a Q&A. I'll do a Q&A at the end, so if you have other questions about all that, I'm happy to answer. I am going to start us off. You're going to hear a couple of the stories from the book this evening, but they're not all going to be read by me because we have our wonderful guests. So I asked your state representative, Selena Colburn, if she would come and be here this evening and choose a story from the book to read, she chose the story that I was hoping she'd choose, which is really magical. Though when you hear it, maybe you'll realize why. So it ties in wonderfully with Hope's realization that maybe she will run for office. Maybe she will. I think so. I think you'll get a lot of votes from in here. And Selena, who is an elected official, is going to read a story about someone else who ran for office. So Selena, I read your amazing bio on the internet and you've done a lot of incredible things. And I did the terrible thing where I didn't write it all down. But you are a librarian. You are a dancer. A professor of dance. A little bit. A total badass. And an elected official since 2015 in the fine state of Vermont. And you were born and raised in Burlington. What did I forget? I got it all. Fantastic. There's way more things. She's being very humble. All right. Your state representative, Selena Fulburn. Do you want the mic or do you want to use politician voice? I'll try my politician voice. And if it doesn't work, you can tell me and I'll use the mic. Is that good? Okay. I will definitely use the mic. And I just want to acknowledge that I represent part of Burlington. But actually, your representative, the amazing Kimberly Jessup, who represents a much closer, yeah, and serves on the House Judiciary Committee with me. And is also a total badass is here. I get to be here. I get to be here because I know Miriam Kleinstahl, the illustrator of this book from many decades ago when we lived in San Francisco together as young people. So the story I chose to read is about Mary Pat Hector, and who was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1997. And I will just read it to you. Mary Pat. Oh, and I'll show you her picture too, because the pictures in this book are amazing. That's her. Mary Pat Hector's campaign for an open seat on the city council of Stonecrest, Georgia hadn't even gotten started before someone tried to stop it. Not because of her political beliefs or some past scandal, but because of her age. An award winning 19 year old college sophomore, Mary Pat had years of experience as an activist youth leader and public speaker, and was eager to launch her political career. But one of her opponents objected and wrote a letter to the county board of elections arguing that she was just too young to run. This is a quote from her. The fact that young people all over the country saw me running and knew they could run to that was the most meaningful part of it. Mary Pat thought this was ridiculous. At age 19, she had the right to vote, but she couldn't be elected to represent her community. She appeared before the board and argued that she should be allowed to run her friends and family packed the courtroom and the board ruled unanimously in her favor. Mary Pat could remain on the ballot. Mary Pat and her team who were all college students amazing worked hard on her campaign. They knocked on doors, handed out flyers and made phone calls to voters. Mary Pat still faced doubt from people who couldn't imagine someone as young as her being their representative. Some told her to wait her turn and questioned how she would balance political responsibilities with school work, but others were excited by her energy and vision and she received mail from young people all over the country who were inspired by her campaign. Mary Pat didn't win the race, but she lost by only 22 votes and she may have scored an even greater victory. Her story inspired a Georgia State Senator to write a bill making it a state law that anyone 18 and older can run for office. And Mary Pat says her campaign was just the first of many to come. So that's a great show to read. And I just wanted to read another snippet from the back of the book. Very short. Talking about things that people can do. And one of these things is having impact on laws and lawmakers. It says it's easy to feel like you can't make a difference when it comes to something as big and important as laws and politicians. But you never know until you try. Any person of any age can write a letter or email, make a phone call, or even pay a visit to their elected representatives. This includes your school board members, city council, the mayor, your state governor, congressional representatives, and even the president. These people are elected to represent you, even if you're too young to vote for them. And I just, beforehand, the microphone back over to Kate just wanted to know that we really saw the truth of that in this legislative session. We went from being a state with very little gun violence prevention legislation to enacting a sweeping package of reforms. And that happened because of youth, especially young women, showing up in our building nearly every day and pushing for change. And I, Representative Jessup and I were in committee room hearing incredibly powerful stories and real urgency from youth who just made a huge difference on a number of pieces of legislation. I also had a bill to expand gender-free restroom access in the state. And that bill really got taken up in both the House and the Senate because of youth leadership advocates from outright Vermont who came and testified in committees and got that bill moving. So just never doubt the power that you can have in the legislative process because I think we really saw that in a historic way this year in Vermont. Thank you. And speaking of that, I do have a stack of postcards, Rad Girls Can postcards that we had made that feature some of the young women from the book. And so we're going to have them after our presentation tonight. We have actually a voter registration session in the back. If anybody in here wants to register to vote, can you pre-register as a 16 or 17-year-old in the state of Vermont? No. Can we get a bill? Can we get a bill? Thank you. All right. Hope, let's connect afterwards. Let's get that going, right? Excellent. Very nice. Excellent. Okay. So, but I will also have postcards afterwards with the book signing. If anybody wants to write a postcard to one of your elected officials. And I don't have enough for everybody in here because there's so many of you here. Fair pond books, everybody. There you go. Thank you. Excellent. I'm not going to let you off the hook quite that fast, Selena. I wanted to ask you just a couple questions. Again, thinking of what Hope said at the beginning, how did you go from having that moment of maybe running for office is something that I want to do to actually deciding to do it? So, I think like a lot of women, I had to be asked, which is really interesting. I had worked on a lot of campaigns. I had worked on, started a non-profit in Vermont on working on reproductive rights issues. I actually grew up in Burlington during Bernie Sanders time as mayor there and was really active in something called the mayor's youth office that whereas a youth I was able to really experience a lot of engagement in local municipal politics in really meaningful ways. But I had to be asked to run multiple times. I said no and I think that's true for a lot of women. I remember one of the campaigns that I managed was for a really close friend of mine who ran for city council in Burlington and she had worked for a non-profit that trained women working in the trades in carpentry and other not traditionally female trades. And she talked about the process that they had to go through helping women to understand that they were qualified for some of the jobs that they were being asked to apply for. So, women would say, I can't be the four person of a construction job. I don't have the skills. I don't have the experience. And then they would go through a series of questions with them. Well, have you ever supervised a group of people? Well, have you ever managed a carpentry project and sort of helped them to realize, no, wait, actually, I do have these skills and qualifications. And even though that had been part of her professional life, when she stepped up to run, she had to go through that experience of people saying, of her saying, oh, I don't have enough experience. And people were like, have you worked at every school in the city? Have you worked at every, you know, volunteer for 20 nonprofits in the city? Have you moved pieces of policy as an activist? And so I think for many of us as women and for maybe people who don't experience that and are ready to go, that is really exciting. But I had to be asked and I had to convince myself that I was ready. And I'm so glad that I did. Because it's definitely changed my life and it's given me an amazing feeling of being able to contribute and make change in a way that I hadn't before. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here. And thank you for saying yes after people asked you. All right, I'm going to read another story from the book. I think this is my first time reading the story out loud by the people that I'm reading about are sitting right next to me. No, actually, I read about the radical monarchs and some of them were at our book launch in Oakland. So this is my second time. Okay, so I hope it's okay. All right. All right, so this story is about Muslim girls making change. And they were founded in Burlington, Vermont in 2015. And if I get anything wrong, let me know later. Don't correct me if I'm wrong. We can correct in a reprint. When 10th grader Hawa Adams saw the flyer in the school hallway for a slam poetry team competition, she knew just what to do. Okay, guys, Hawa told her friends, Kiran, Lina, and Belkissa, we have to prepare something. We have to do this. Did it matter that two of the four girls hadn't never written a poem? And that the other two had only recently discovered slam poetry is a powerful form of expression? No. For four brown skim Muslim girls growing up in Vermont, what mattered were the stories they wanted to tell and the emotions that they wanted to convey. Slam poetry is a creative competition. Poets don't just recite their poems. They perform them and they vie for the highest score. Though any slam poet will tell you it's not about the points, it's about the poetry. The poems are often political and personal. And the style of performance tends to be intense and powerful. The four friends called their team Muslim Girls Making Change, MGMC, and they worked together for weeks to write their first poem. Wake Up America is about the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, and how American Muslims became the targets of suspicion, harassment, and even violence in the months and years that followed. MGMC went to the audition and blew away the judges who immediately signed them up to represent the state of Vermont at the international brave new voices slam poetry competition. Just a few months after the audition, the girls took a 20-hour car ride to Washington, D.C., do you remember that? Where they became the first all Muslim team to perform. They didn't win, but they were a huge hit. Hawa, Kira, Lina, and Balkisa had met at their local Islamic community center, where they bonded over many things, including their shared experiences as Muslim girls in Vermont. Vermont is the second white estate in America. And while people of any race or ethnicity can be Muslim, the members of MGMC are all brown skinned. As a result, the girls are constantly asked questions about their identities. They know that many of these questions aren't intended to be offensive, but they get tired of having to explain their own existence. Their poem hijab 101 is a humorous but also serious attempt to answer the endless inquiries the girls receive about their hijabs, the traditional Muslim head coverings they all wear every day. The poem is especially powerful for Kiran who's not here this evening, but she says hi, who didn't begin wearing her hijab until she was in 10th grade. She wanted to wear it, but in middle school she just wanted to fit in. She was afraid of looking different and of being judged. She felt proud once she began to wear her hijab to school, and she used her experiences to help craft the poem, which begins with a list of frequently asked questions, such as aren't you hot in that? Do you shower with that on? What's underneath that thing? Why do you wear that? You were prettier before. Can I see your hair? Does your dad make you wear it? MGMC have performed their poems all over their home state and beyond, and they've expanded their subject matter as well. They address many contemporary issues and injustices from police brutality to the ways that immigrants are viewed in America. They also lead poetry and performance workshops where they show other young people how to use poetry to express emotions and experiences that the world needs to hear. That is our story about Muslim girls making change. I said earlier that one of the hardest things about the book was kind of knowing when to stop in terms of who to include in the book, but I think another big challenge was having to edit these stories down. I had a pretty tight word count. We try to keep the stories on the shorter side to give people a little bit of a snippet of what these people are about, but that means that I have to leave out a lot of really interesting information. There was a lot about you guys that I wanted to include. You guys performed at the Women's March in Vermont, so many other prestigious things, and also I wrote this before you'd all been accepted into fantastic prestigious colleges that you're all going to be attending in the fall. Congratulations. I'm going to ask a few questions and have them share a little about their experiences, but before that you do get to hear a poem. Hi everyone, I'm Lina. I'm Paula. I'm Paula Tisa. And unfortunately, as mentioned before, Kiran couldn't join us today, but we will be performing a poem called Welcome. Welcome. And it talks about the Syrian refugee crisis. Child, your mother is calling you. Come mix into this melting pot. We invite the flavor, the culture, the warmth. Come to the land of the free, to the home of the great. Whose land is this? How far does your freedom go back? Do you know the names of the tribes you stand on? Who decides who stands here? My torch is lit for you. I stand alone in the dark. Come join me. Come. My soil is ready for your footprints. I have made this place one for your feet to stop all over the restrictions. Child, come swim in this liquor of liberty. Let me tell you, I fought hard for my freedom. My children are dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My family is dead. I am alone. I cannot breathe. Tell me, who is truly welcome here? Lady Liberty, teach us again. I'm still teaching with open arms. Please join me. Please hug me. Enrich me. Truly make this great again. Lady Liberty, you are billed with broken chains at your feet. You are a gift that tried to erase the memory of the time that our darker folks' eyes cloud with heads down, souls broken. Can your people welcome us without owning us? Yes, I am a mother. You are my children. I cannot own my own kin. My family is deeper than countries and boundaries. My bloodline is thicker than oceans. Give me all those who ache to breathe in a space where they will not be beaten, forgetting to let their lungs expand. Yes, I want your tired, poor, the ones yearning to breathe free. Child, breathe free. We can't breathe. The walls, they talk of building our closing in on us. Where is the freedom to want to give out so graciously? Why are you fusing today when you accepted us yesterday? You are welcome. I invite you who have suffered to enjoy this freedom to be fed. I'll let you in. Have let them in. I held my torch for all to see when they drew close, that their travel had paid off. I'm still prepared for the waves, the currents of people washing onto my beaches. Do you mean the pollution? We are trash. We take up too much space. No one speaks up for us. We're the emigrants who store your jobs, who build your jobs. Oh, how you forget history. You turned away Jewish refugees to send them back to Europe. Send them back to the camps they had run from. It was so close. Weighing on the beaches of Florida, full of hope. America would save them. You would save them, but we're a threat, aren't we? That justifies it. Right? We're spies of danger to national security. We work. We are scary, dangerous, foreign. But are we all your children? It is time to make a man. Knock, knock. We're here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. One of my favorite stories in the book, to research and to write, actually, is a story of Yusor Mardini, who was a Syrian refugee, who was a swimmer, and training as a swimmer was a girl and a teenager and a swimmer. And then the war started, and she couldn't train anymore because her pool got bombed. And when she was 18, she and her sister finally were able to escape, and they were on a boat of 20 refugees fleeing Turkey, had a degrease, and the boat broke and began to sink. Some people may know the story. She dived into the water and swam. She and her sister swam the boat to Greece, to the shores of Greece. It took them over three hours, and they saved the lives of every refugee on that boat. They got to Greece. They made it through four different countries. She made it to Germany. First thing she wanted to do was join a swim team, which she did, and she ended up being on the first refugee team in the Olympics in 2016, and she was able to swim in the Olympics. And she's going to be swimming in 2020, in the Olympics, or she's hoping to. She's training to swim. And so thank you for sharing that particular story, and I know that when I was writing the story of Yusor Mardini for this book, I was researching it about a year and a half ago, kind of when the refugee crisis worldwide was, this feels weird to say, peaking, because it's kind of always peaking. But it was also right after the Muslim ban. And in reading that story and knowing that I was going to put it in the book, it made me feel this kind of hope that at least I could be knowing that I would include that story of perseverance and such a powerful story of a refugee in the book, which leads me to maybe my first question for you guys. I think you have loud voices, so I'll hand you the mic. But I'm interested in you began doing this together, to write poems to share your own personal stories, right? Things that were very personal about you and your immediate experiences with your identity. You've now evolved. You've been working together for several years, and the piece you just performed was very much about speaking in the voices of other people and sharing those stories. I'm just curious to know how you guys came to that. This wasn't, we prepared beforehand. I told them questions I was going to ask, and I'm just throwing them this curved because I was really moved, so sorry. But I'm curious, the other ones will all be pre-rehearsed, don't worry. But I'm really curious to know how did you guys come to deciding or we're going to talk about other experiences and how does it feel to be sharing stories of other communities who are marginalized and silenced? Okay. So when we first came together back in 2016, we didn't know what to write about. We were new to Slam poetry. And so obviously the one common thing that we had in common was that we're Muslim. And so with everything that was happening around the world, Islamophobia was a big thing that we wanted to bring to light. And so we did research and we discovered all these hidden crimes and things that injustices that have been happening to Muslims in all different types of communities. And so we realized that we didn't know about these crimes. How would the world know about those? And it's injustice that's happening to people that are exactly like us. So it's important that we bring those to light. So we had to tell their stories. And then eventually we incorporated our own stories because of course ours aren't as extreme and are direct, but those microaggressions mattered and they affected us every day. So we wanted to bring our stories to light along with them to kind of like balance it out, I guess. And so I don't know, it's just kind of evolved with the pieces. And it's really important that, you know, even though we're doing like persona poetry that we're not like taking over somebody's words or taking over their story. And we're just showing it to the best that we understand it. And we do try to understand it fully. Yeah. And it's definitely really important to share these stories in order for people to take action. I think it really does start off with having that conversation, but it doesn't stop there. Because it's really important, especially now in this political climate, to take action and to help out people who are facing these issues. And people cannot just stand here and tell their stories. And just like that's the end, you know, like the story doesn't end there. It continues with people getting involved and seeing what they can do to help. So I think that's what's really important with sharing other people's stories. Also like adding on to that, I feel like it's also really important to understand that our mission and what we do is so much more than just the four of us talking about our own personal experiences. We've been so blessed and honored to have this privileged platform that we've created. And it's our duty to talk about like everything else that's going on, to give voice to those who are voiceless, who don't have the opportunity to talk about their issues. And so that's what we really try to do. Like we have a poem called Wake Up America, which talks about our personal experiences. But the idea behind that whole poem is talking about what else is happening to other Muslims in the world that we have no idea that's going on. So I feel like our main thing is going beyond the four of us and like talking about everybody else and giving them the opportunity to share their stories and their voice. And that actually leads into my next question, which I did tell you I was going to ask. But so speaking of moving from hearing about something into action, I actually want to give a quick plug. Since you shared that particular story, if anyone is looking for yet another amazing organization doing incredibly powerful work in the world, I just want to shout out the this is an organization called Circle of Health International that I've done a lot of supporting for the executive directors in the back. She didn't know I was going to mention her. That's Sarah. But Circle of Health International is an organization that does maternal and reproductive and pediatric healthcare in the war zones around the world. And they've been in Syria having having clinics in hospitals in Syria for many years. They've been in Haiti. They've been in Puerto Rico. They're also on the US Mexico border giving immediate medical care to people just out of detention centers. They've been training midwives all around the world and making sure that women and babies and children who are the most vulnerable in these most vulnerable of places are cared for and are getting the medical care they need. So it's called Circle of Health International. If you've already given to the ACLU and every other organization, shout out Sarah. Thanks for your work and thanks to you. So that leads me to asking you how do you see so in this time of activism and there's so much going on and how do we raise awareness and get involved? How do you see what do you see the role of poetry and storytelling in activism and awareness these days? I feel like poetry has been our outlet to talk about all these issues that we really care about because through poetry there's not one right way to write a poem. Like every it's very unique to the person, very unique to the writer's style and so just being able to be yourself and use your own unique artistic traits to talk about issues that you really deeply care about has been like the reason why we chose poetry as a way to do it. It's also because like I love this line that Karen always says she's like through poetry when we're up here and we're talking nobody can interrupt us you know so like the floor is really hard and so that's one reason why poetry has been our outlet to talk about social justice issues. Yeah and it definitely allows people who are facing these issues head on to reclaim their narratives and just like just bashing on the dangers of a single story and allowing politicians to hear these stories so they can do something about it. It really does affect their work and how they can make change about it. Also for us it really how we were inspired was from other youth who were able to use poetry to get involved to talk about these political issues and I've definitely seen like a lot of my conversations with people become more politically charged and it led to me like figuring out how I can like get connected with them and it helped me like do a lot of networking along with these girls so it definitely has helped not only just again saying before like not like like I said before not just having these conversations but also getting involved because it's so so so important and that's something we really really want to shed light on so that's why we we've continued our work for so long but I think poetry like through doing it for so long now I think the one thing that it helped like us out with is building communities so I definitely think that there's a lot of different ways that you can reach out to people and you can stay in contact with them but I think poetry has allowed us to get more like I don't know more of our youth like more of us and our peers like involved and allowed them to kind of like see that there's this new type of style of activism and it's different it's not limiting very accessible and so I think it's just a way of just kind of bringing those people together in this time where there's so many different like avenues for activism it's definitely one that I wouldn't have seen myself doing but here I am so I think every youth can relate to that eventually when they become part of that community of activists and when they become part of this poetry experience because we still stay in contact with people that we met in Washington D.C. and we still know those guys and hit them whatever we want and poetry is always the one thing that's going to bring us together and then beyond that we're all activists separately and then we're all activists together through poetry. So one more question speaking of being activists together and then also separately you know in this book I write about a lot of individuals who've done remarkable things and in each of those stories I try to also really include information about the communities they worked with right because nobody does this stuff alone so even if I'm writing about one individual person they all relied on their community their peers sometimes their parents sometimes not at all their parents sometimes teachers or mentors or coaches but I also include stories of groups like you guys and a few other duos and groups and organizations but you said something kind of striking upstairs which is that working together and doing this has actually led you guys to really discover yourselves as individuals so I wonder just as a last question if you could talk about that process how is working together in a very close-knit way where in fact you're often speaking in unison I think which is really a remarkable aspect of your performance that you're not just you're really speaking together but then how does that let you kind of discover yourselves individually I like going first because I know my answers to these questions and so it's not that hard but um doing this as a group has like really changed all of us individually because I feel like it's so much easier being able to be on stage with my friends by my side talking about these things that matter to us all I felt like middle school me was like really scared to like raise my hand in class or like I was like really closed in and like I wasn't as confident as I am now like there's something going on let's go we'll handle it type of thing you know and so it's a lot easier having them by my side being able to do it with them and also having them like influence me inspire me to do better and be better because I feel like there's a lot of things that we all do individually but the amazing thing is we all get each other involved we're like oh you're doing this okay let's go like tomorrow I have this going on like we're always like together doing the things we do separately and it just really helps us grow confidence and just really grow as women and I feel like it's a lot like it's a lot it's a lot better having them by my side being able to tell me I can do something in a world that's telling me I can't do something you know so yeah yeah like as mentioned before as Kisa said it's definitely been easier to have them by my side not only with my confidence but also being more comfortable to talk about these issues and that's generally how our poems start off you know like we like start ranting about something and then we're like okay wait what are we doing let's write a poem about this like we're poets but it's it's definitely been easier because as Kisa said I've I've been that kid who's been in the back of the classroom who didn't even want to get up and go sharpen my pencil because it would just like cause too much of a distraction like that's how bad it was and I never I never found myself and I definitely truly found myself with these girls helping me because and especially with a brave new voice is when we went there which was which is an international poetry competition we attended going there has really shed light on being able to be truly yourself and be unapologetic about that because that's so important especially at the at that age especially living in Vermont and being like a person of color like that's so important and getting involved and be able to share your story and like like we've said before it's definitely made it easier by them by having them by my side yeah I agree I think we have this shared experience together and being able to continue to evolve and build off of that with them by my side has made it completely like like just relaxed and I can go up in front of strangers say whatever I want do whatever I want so yeah I think our first like rehearsal together you know we weren't willing to do that we weren't willing to share anything with each other although we're all like you know Muslim team the same grade everything same mosque but different communities you know we have these differences even though we have like really big similarities as well you know I'm we're Somali Lena's Yemeni in Egyptian and then Karen's Pakistani so we have a lot of cultural differences as well as just like different preferences on just like anything movies both whatever music is key I think it's allowed me to see that like yes I have them and I have this Muslim identity with them but I also have myself and I have my music taste my my book preferences and I know what I want to do and I know I can always count on them to encourage me and continue me into my path you guys are gonna like rock into college just like okay like you're gonna like the first first lecture year and you're gonna be like professor actually no um thank you guys so much um and please come back and enjoy this here I really love what you said about how no one can interrupt you when you're sharing a poem I've never thought about it but that's really when I'm up here reading these stories I'm like yeah no one's gonna interrupt and argue with me maybe they'll try afterwards but it's uh it's powerful um so thank you all for being people who are using your platform and your position of power to do such impactful and truly rad things um people ask me all the time obviously like what does it mean to be rad like what what does rad mean um and you know I we joke that we use the word rad in our first book because I grew up in northern California and Miriam grew up in southern California as like a surfer punk and I grew up as like a northern California hippie kid and we both use the word rad all the time it was just like in every other sentence in my childhood and it's kind of still is actually but um but also you know rad is just like this eternal word that means word that means cool and awesome but it's also short for radical um and we have a lot of negative associations with radical sometimes but also to be radical means to be someone who's willing to do something differently to be the first one to do something to do something that's never been done to take a chance or take that step and the stories that we tell in these books are really about people who've done that who are willing to run for office who are willing to get up and do a slam home who are willing to you know take some step to to train to go after something that they believe in and so those are the stories that we tell um and thank you guys so much for being here um for being so rad and so we have a few minutes if anybody has questions um you'd like to ask yes um i you could just speak loud i can echo it i think this one's for you guys so to uh to paraphrase so what what do you do like how do you prioritize like studying for a test when like the world is burning and you want to go do other things yeah i forget that test no um i feel like that's something that we struggled with a lot especially our junior and our senior year because that's when yeah especially junior year because we had like performances all the time like three times a week and they were like at nighttime and stuff and just balancing out schoolwork which was really important to us but activism which was so much more important to us was really really hard because i feel like i found myself coming from performances at like 11 o'clock at night because there were like a really far distance or something and like 11 o'clock i would start studying and be up studying until like 2am you know so obviously i'm not going to stop doing what i really want to do but i'm also not going to let down my schoolwork and my education because that's also what's keeping me really powerful you know and so um yeah just finding the time to balance them both out but um being able to do what i really love and then um i guess losing a couple hours of sleep to do homework yeah just echoing what quisa said really solidifying our time management skills that has definitely it's helped i mean it's definitely needed in college um but yeah i know like there are times where um kirin and i have had a test like an ap euro test that we had to study for on our way because we had it the next day but we were like on our way to our performance and we knew we were gonna come back super super late so we were literally studying on our way so we definitely make it work we definitely find the time um it's it's been challenging but i mean like going to college it's it's worked so yeah but honestly i think yeah i think of course time management and prioritizing is uh really important but it's also really hard to do so i think the earlier you do it the better so i definitely think when we were performing like three times a day sometimes that was crazy um like it was better it's okay to like say no to certain things and it was really hard for me to learn that um because i wanted to take so much on but i think if you learn that early enough you'll have more time later on to like do more stuff um that you love to do so i think just getting that through your head that it's like okay this person just might get a little mad because i can't come to this performance or do this one project with them um it's okay because there's going to be a million other people waiting for you um that you can please um also i think i think you just gotta like take your i don't know take your take it day by day it's really exhausting um but it's gonna like pay off later on and there's just like so many other people that are going through it that you can definitely like talk to um to help you kind of like get through like that stress um i know we even though we had homework we still like hit each other up like hey do you do homework with that in so just like find people that can help you calm down a little bit so it's like the uh it's like the classic activist struggle right like how do you destroy capitalism under capitalism uh yes um thank you oh thank you women girls to find their voice as early so uh the question comes from a middle school teacher and it's about you know kind of the best way to help women and girls um and i would say young boys as well to find to find their voice um and and that confidence um as as early as possible yeah any uh any tips i guess allowing them to be comfortable with being uncomfortable i think that's something we've definitely had to face um and learn the hard way because i know in middle school like like i've said before we've never used our voices but just exposing them to these these related issues and allowing them to have these conversations with their peers is super crucial even though it might be might be a little uncomfortable um i think that's how you get the best conversations going and that's how you learn the most um i think that's that's a good start but um personally from working with middle schoolers like we've done workshops with middle schoolers around like poetry and getting them to um express their voices and their opinions and stuff i've realized they just don't have the platform or the opportunity or the space and a classroom or somewhere to talk about those things you know because i feel like a lot of times we think oh they're just kids like they're still young like they have no idea what's going on but like honestly the poems these like guys were writing girls and guys were writing were so amazing like we thought we were good like they were so amazing and um and they have a lot to say a lot to talk about so just giving them the opportunity to talk about it whether that's listening to them or giving them time in class and just being there for them and just letting them to express themselves yeah this is i think that's really key um i actually did like a a keynote with karen about this about like how to how to kind of combat adultism but i think it exists guys but um i think you really have to meet them halfway so i i think it's important that you um because i think most of these students like about people were saying already have already have these things in mind already know what they can and are able to like say um they just need the space to do it just need accommodations you know it was really important to me when i was getting into activism scene that there was transportation wherever i went there was some kind of like i don't know stipend type of thing um anything that just shows that like they're appreciated and it's and you can make it possible for them to have these spaces to speak up and talk about what they care about because they do care i have two middle schoolers who have seen you all perform daughters and i think also having experiences like that for middle schoolers who can see you know what they're not quite peers but um what what young people are capable of is like you all are total rock stars to my kids and you're very inspiring to them but you also make them feel like a sense of possibility about what they can do yeah i mean you're gonna get a biased answer because uh you've got a lot of writers up here but like my answer to that is like creative writing in the classroom or the arts in the classroom people express themselves in a lot of different ways and when you are at that particular middle school age saying what you're feeling and thinking is it's hard enough for us at any age but at that age in particular i've taught creative writing for like 20 years i've taught worked with tons of middle schoolers and the most transformative stuff i've seen in classrooms is when we do creative writing when we do poetry short stories um any kind of creative work in the classroom you could bring it in in any subject um it's so many different ways there's so many books out there to kind of help you figure out how to do it and i think that can get people to express themselves um and share in ways that um you just don't normally get i didn't get it until i was in high school any kind of creative writing in the classroom and that's what maybe you want to be a writer so yes hi henry um i'm someone who really believes that young people and especially youth of color should be at every leadership table every strategic table trying to figure out how to get us out of this mess um i won't be like cup half empty kind of person but to me uh you know voting is really strong but it's kind of like a cup uh one three hundred and sixty fifth full right because it happens on one day and i'm wondering y'all you know what is your strategic sort of orientation to that y'all feel really strong about that or what else could we be doing all together to fill up that mass action company you know collaboratively be doing the other four days speaking of that one special voting day i do believe you guys have a primary coming up next tuesday right memory yeah okay great um yes activism tips yeah oh yeah um i will give one quick answer to that um you know i try so i do this group called solidarity sundays um we have chapters all over the country we meet once a month in person to take practical meaningful political action but we also do a lot of stuff um online i try to share um and and get people to do creative frequent action things that are very doable right you can write a letter to the editor you can you know make your phone call send your emails you can make a sign and put it in your car in your window right like there's just like so many different things we can do and right well you know how do we say in the wake of the horrible disaster of 2016 there have been some positive things that have happened right such as like there are so many great organizations out there that are putting out every day actions things you can do ways you can act right there's a great thing called rogan's list of people i love rogan's list rogn apostrophe s it's run by a woman who i think is a librarian and she's got a team and they compile concrete information and actions that you can do every day there's an organization called daily action you can get text messages from them you can go to their facebook group uh indivisible has stuff has stuff that you can do every day so getting into that habit i think is really crucial i just have another quick plug so i'm part of this group called results always as well but i'm in charge of the us poverty chapter and so i'm working on recruiting more people to get involved and as you know the farm bill that's passed in the house has made drastic changes to snap and millions and millions of people will not be able to access that which is terrible and so this group is definitely working on taking action meeting with our members of congress and just allowing them to vote no on this farm bill so if you guys want to get involved definitely contact me you can talk to me afterwards but yeah i think the most important thing is just like really getting involved because there's so much amazing organizations out there so much amazing people doing the work and when there's like two people doing the work it's a lot better than one person getting it done and um yeah just even if it's like helping voting on voting day or just like whatever it is just being involved i feel like getting involved in doing the work is really really important because other people like your kids are watching you get involved your students are watching you get involved your peers are watching you get involved so by you taking the first step you're leading everybody else too um i just i don't know i think it's ridiculous that you wouldn't find anything to do because there's it's like the least that you could do like the bare minimum is stay informed so and you can do that through any sort of social media platform basic news channels anything that's that's the bare minimum and then the rest is up to you so you kind of have to decide do i go through it through non-profit work do i get involved um by working with young youth and do i do it through writing whatever it is um that's for you to like take on and you to decide what you want to do so there's never nothing that you can't do i mean the easiest thing that you could probably do is also just tweet something like that has made numerous changes in the world um that was we saw from the um just last election huh or yeah just stay informed that's that's the biggest help that you can contribute i think there are a lot of ways to get involved and you can even just google something like just think of an issue that you care about and find a way whether it's in your local community or even nationally to become involved in it and to lobby for it or phone bank or canvas for it or even just have an art project like there are just so many ways to be involved and if you can't find something in your community then create it and i think that i think that ties back to the why i started the race against racism too is because i wanted like what you mentioned before i wanted visibility in my community um for the fight for racial justice and i wanted it to be public and big and so i started it and all right so there's your answer just do something and if it's not happening just start it um all right um so i'm sure there are many many more questions we could ask our wonderful folks but i know you guys have like things to do and maybe you want to buy a book um that'd be great um so i will i'm going to be up here signing books um all wonderful maybe you guys would be willing to sign a book if people wanted you to um and i really want to thank um their pond books for having all of us um this is a wonderful bookstore i'm glad you exist um i i'm definitely preaching to the choir here but please continue to support your local independent bookseller it's very important and wait before you go i have a plug for one book for the grownups um because we've really been talking a lot about racial justice um for the grownups in the audience i really want to recommend the book white fragility do you have white fragility by robin d angelo okay if you have white fragility by robin d angelo um white grownups that's your homework um thank you so much to everybody for coming uh thank you to muslim girls making change thank you salina cobin thank you hope for giving us hope