Get to know National Youth Poet Laureate Patricia Frazier
CHICAGO - National Youth Poet Laureate Patricia Frazier said the written word - particularly that of fellow black female Chicago writers and activists - has always found her: She grew up in the Ida B. Wells Homes and attended Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy.
A film major at Columbia College (with a minor in creative writing), Frazier spent the last academic year as the first Chicago Youth Poet Laureate, writing her debut book "Graphite" (coming out in September with Haymarket Books). The poems explore her grandmother's death and gentrification.
With her newly minted national title, she not only wants to share her experience of being a queer, black woman from the South Side of Chicago but also encourage others to write their own stories.
Her passion for spoken word began when she realized the limits of her musical abilities. She wrote songs, short stories and poems "imagining different ways that the place that I was from could exist."
She was planning on singing at her fourth
