Exploring Poetic Voices

In this poem, a black woman carefully analyzes her interaction with a white waitress, whose actions, although civil, are smoldering with superiority.

Until Daniel Beaty was 3 years old, his father would "knock knock" on his door every morning. This performance explores the shaping of personal identity in an incarcerated parent's absence.

Rosie Molinary describes how she felt as a Latina teenager in the United States, caught between disparate and unrealistic beauty standards.

In 1830, the government began systematically removing all Native Americans from the Eastern United States. The removal of Cherokees from Georgia in 1838 has become known as the Trail of Tears. But there were, in fact, many such trails, as the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles and other tribes were forced to abandon their homelands.

“She said, 'You know, there was a time we couldn't wear no fingernail polish...'”

"Rough on Rats" is a late 19th-century advertisement for a pesticide. The image depicts a stereotypical Chinese man eating a rat.

A white man writes about his journey to understanding his racial privilege and the “benefit of the doubt” that life has afforded him.