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In the Rising Voices of 10 Young Poets, a Call for Change

By Pierre-Antoine-Louis
from the New-York Times


The special project Young Black Poets showcases a promising a generation of writers whose verses respond to this moment in America.
Nyarae Francis(on the background picture), a 16-year-old high school junior in Los Angeles, is one of the writers featured in the special project Young Black Poets. In the interactive article on the poets, she reads her work “For the missing black girls.” Credit...Nyarae Francis


Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

Samuel Getachew, 17, believes poetry can be a catalyst for change and can help people understand one another. A spoken word poet and Oakland’s 2019 Youth Poet Laureate, he wrote

“justice for — ”
which reflected his emotions about America’s unrest. In the first half of the work, he wrote:

i tried to write a poem for george. / and breonna. / and tony. / and elijah. and none of them made it past a scribble / past a draft / past the passing thought / that i could leave the name and the details blank / and this would be the same poem / that i’ve been writing since i was 14 years old / and i am so tired / of explaining why i’m tired

SAMUEL GETACHEW YOUTH SPEAKS TEEN POETRY FINAL 2019
Audre Lorde, the poet laureate of New York State in 1991, once said,
“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
Mr. Getachew and several other young Black poets across the country are lending their voices to those who may not feel heard and are amplifying emotions within their communities, while also finding coping mechanisms through creativity.
The Times special project Young Black Poets which published online Friday and features Mr. Getachew and nine others, focuses on the works of poets ages 12 to 19 and shows how a new generation is responding to the current climate in America. The project, which includes interviews and recordings of the poets reading their works, is a collaboration among the Culture desk, the Special Sections desk and the Surfacing team, which specializes in major visual projects.

The effort began early this summer. Jaspal Riyait, the art director who played a significant role in choosing the poets, credits the photo editor Sandra Stevenson and her son, now 20, as driving forces behind the idea.

The Times colleagues spent time discussing the ways in which Ms. Stevenson’s son was coping through art. That led the teams to ponder how young people nationwide were dealing with current events, especially the social justice uprising.
If you’re a young adult, this is the first time in your life where you’re seeing this collective response on this national level,”
Ms. Riyait said. “We started looking at a very particular time when young minds are molding and forming and not being influenced but being an influencer. And I think that was really import Realizing that poetry was one of the main avenues of expression for young people, the team reached out to arts organizations around the country like UrbArts in St. Louis, and viewed events held by groups like Young Chicago Authors. Starting in June, Ms. Riyait and the team did more research online, looking at the various poet laureates across the country, spending time reading their poems and watching their videos.
“It was a very deep enjoyable rabbit hole.”
she said.

Many of the selected poets participated in local youth poetry organizations, performed nationally, produced elaborate videos of their work and competed at various festivals. As part of the project, I interviewed all 10 poets about their writing process, their inspiration and why poetry matters now. Inari Williams, 18, who is also a rapper, said some of his inspiration came from talking with people less fortunate than others.

“The homeless population in Chicago is very large, and sometimes I run into homeless people and they just want to be heard,”
he said.
“I try to give them a voice through my art.”
Many of them expressed to me that they felt they had a responsibility to their communities to speak about the issues and injustices of those around them. They submitted poems for the project that focus on the Black Lives Matter movement, women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, what it means to be Black in America, police brutality, gun violence, the pandemic and self-care. Leila Mottley, 18, of Oakland, Calif., who recently landed a book deal with Knopf, said,
“I’m often contemplating girlhood and Black girlhood and what it means to attempt to find joy and family and community in situations that call for basic survival.”
When I asked William Lohier 19, of Brooklyn, why he thought poetry matters in this moment, he said that poetry had mattered in every moment and that the issues that he and others have confronted this year were the issues that every Black poet he knows has been thinking about since they started writing poetry. Here you can get some insights of his poetry
William Lohier speaks
he said,

"I see poetry ultimately,”

“as a tool for Black liberation“I see poetry ultimately,”



For These Girls, Danger Is a Way of Life

Poverty, violence, and cultural traditions oppress millions of girls around the world, but some are finding hope through education.

BY ALEXIS OKEOWO

AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHANIE SINCLAIR
from the National Geographic


SIERRA LEONE IS one of the worst places in the world to be a girl. In this West African country of about six million people, cleaved by a vicious civil war that lasted more than a decade and more recently devastated by Ebola, simply being born a girl means a lifetime of barriers and traditions that often value girls’ bodies more than their minds. Most females here—90 percent, according to UNICEF—have undergone female genital mutilation (FGM), which initiates them into adulthood and is supposed to endow them with marriage appeal, but also is a culturally ingrained way of controlling their sexuality.

Nearly half of all girls marry before age 18, and many become pregnant much younger—often a couple of months or so after their first menstrual cycle. Many are victims of sexual violence; rape often goes unpunished. In 2013 more than a quarter of girls 15 to 19 years old in Sierra Leone were pregnant or had children, one of the highest pregnancy rates in the world for that age-group. And too many die in childbirth—at a rate that is the highest in the world, according to an estimate by the World Health Organization and other international agencies. FGM can increase the risk of childbirth complications.

“If you go to the provinces, you see 13-year-olds, 15-year-olds, married, carrying babies,”
says Annie Mafinda, a midwife at the Rainbo Center, which assists victims of sexual violence in the capital city of Freetown. Many of the center’s patients are 12 to 15 years old, Mafinda says.

When I met Sarah in Freetown, a city that rests on a hilly peninsula with a glimmering harbor, she was 14 years old and six months pregnant, but she looked several years younger. Sarah had a whisper of a voice, a small, delicate frame, red-painted toenails, and a pale peach head scarf tied tightly around her hair. She told me she had been raped by a boy who lived near her family’s home and who left town after the alleged attack. When her mother learned of the pregnancy, she kicked Sarah out of the house. Now Sarah (her last name is being withheld) lives with the mother of the boy who she said attacked her. The mother of her alleged rapist was the only one who would take her in; Sierra Leonean women typically live with their husbands’ families. Sarah has to cook, clean, and do laundry for the household. The boy’s mother beats her if she’s too tired to do her chores, Sarah said.

With so many obstacles in Sierra Leone, how is a girl like Sarah to live—and thrive?
In a poor country run by a government that seems to have little will to protect girls, the wisest thing they can do is try to escape the station in which they were born. Amid all the threats, school can be their only refuge. Education is a challenge because of the fees, but it is also a source of hope. A high school degree can give them more economic freedom and a chance to forge their own lives, perhaps by enabling them to attend a university or get jobs that require more skills.

Yet one estimate says that only about one in three girls attended secondary school between 2008 and 2012, and pregnancy is among the biggest hurdles. Sierra Leone’s ministry of education banned pregnant girls from attending school. The intent of the policy, which was formalized by the government in 2015, is to prevent them from influencing their peers and to protect them from ridicule.

Sierra Leone’s ban on pregnant girls in school

“is a knee-jerk, old-fashioned morality, and it’s the wrong statement to make,”
says author Aminatta Forna, who started a small village school here in 2003.
“These are vulnerable young girls, and there is a lot of predation on young girls in Sierra Leone.”
Elizabeth Dainkeh was coordinator of an education center in Freetown for school-age pregnant girls and mothers that was supported by UNICEF, along with Sierra Leone’s education ministry and others.
“When you become pregnant, they put you aside,”
she says. Dainkeh stands at the back of a steamy classroom where girls in braids and bright head scarves, some cradling infants, fan themselves with their workbooks as they listen attentively to the teacher.
“I thought they would be ashamed [to return to school], but they are happy to be here,”
she says, with obvious pride. Dainkeh herself was pregnant at 17; her father threw her out of the house. Her daughter died of malnutrition before turning one. Now 35, she advises her students to persevere: Put those lost years out of school behind them and forge ahead.

BUILDING BLOCKS OF LIFE FOUND ON MARS

Two landmark discoveries reveal organic carbon on the red planet, shaping the future hunt for life on Mars.

BY MICHAEL GRESHKO and background picture known as "the self-portrait of the Mars rover Curiosity" by NASA
from the National Geographic

DAY TO DAY, it’s easy to lose sight of an astonishing fact: Since 2012, humankind has been driving a nuclear-powered sciencemobile the size of an SUV on another planet.

This engineering marvel, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, has revolutionized our understanding of the red planet. And thanks to the intrepid rover, we now know that ancient Mars had carbon-based compounds called organic molecules—key raw materials for life as we know it.

A new study published in Science on Thursday presents the first conclusive evidence for large organic molecules on the surface of Mars, a pursuit that began with NASA’s Viking landers in the 1970s. Earlier tests may have hinted at organics, but the presence of chlorine in martian dirt complicated those interpretations.

“When you work with something as crazy as a rover on Mars, with the most complex instrument ever sent to space, it seems like we’re doing what may have been perceived earlier as impossible,” says lead author Jennifer Eigenbrode, a biogeochemist at NASA Goddard. “I work with an amazing group of people on Mars, and we have discovered so much.” Curiosity's latest data reveal that the watery lake that once filled Mars’s Gale Crater contained complex organic molecules about 3.5 billion years ago. Hints of them are still preserved in sulfur-spiked rocks derived from lake sediments. Sulfur may have helped protect the organics even when the rocks were exposed at the surface to radiation and bleach-like substances called perchlorates.
Curiosity's latest data reveal that the watery lake that once filled Mars’s Gale Crater contained complex organic molecules about 3.5 billion years ago. Hints of them are still preserved in sulfur-spiked rocks derived from lake sediments. Sulfur may have helped protect the organics even when the rocks were exposed at the surface to radiation and bleach-like substances called perchlorates. By themselves, the new results aren't evidence for ancient life on Mars; non-living processes could have yielded identical molecules. At a minimum, the study shows how traces of bygone martians could have survived for eons—if they existed at all—and it hints at where future rovers might look for them.
“This is an important finding,” says Samuel Kounaves, a Tufts University chemist and former lead scientist for NASA's Phoenix Mars lander. “There are locations, especially subsurface, where organic molecules are well-preserved.” Seasons of Methane In addition to ancient carbon, Curiosity has caught whiffs of organics that exist on Mars today. The rover has periodically sniffed Mars’s atmosphere since it landed, and in late 2014, researchers using these data showed that methane—the simplest organic molecule—is present in Mars’s atmosphere. Methane’s presence on Mars is puzzling, because it survives only a few hundred years at a time, which means that somehow, something on the red planet keeps replenishing it. “It’s a gas in the atmosphere of Mars that really shouldn’t be there," says NASA Jet Propulsion Lab scientist Chris Webster. In addition, methane's observed behavior on Mars is bizarre. In 2009, researchers reported that inexplicable martian plumes randomly belch out thousands of tons of methane at a time.
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