This week, we’ve been rolling out some of the amazing poets who are helping with this year’s contest. Up next is Estefania Lugo.
Estefanía Lugo is a brilliant bilingual creative strategist with a sharp eye for the written word.
She delights in exploring authors’ imaginations and celebrating the richness of their voices.
This contest is not just national but international, and we are honored to have Estefanía as part of the team!
If you are on Instagram, please head over to my page here and show her some love!
Reminder: This year’s poetry contest is accepting submissions from now to June 1st!
Theme: “What We’re Carrying Now.”
This theme explores personal loss, collective memory, survival, and the emotional weight of living in today’s world. Through this contest, we are not only uplifting poets, but we are also creating space for community storytelling, reflection, and connection through the arts.
This week, we are rolling out some of the amazing poets who are helping with this year’s contest. Up next is BrinwiththePen.
Love-centered poet Brinwiththepen inspires safety and inclusion through her poetry and the workshops she facilitates.
Brin joined Atlanta’s poetry community in 2021 and pours into the intentional time and space of writing with The Ink Refill, a monthly poetry writing workshop.
I met her in 2024 when we were both poetry features at the same event. I also got to witness her brilliance at one of her workshops.
We are honored to have Brinwiththepen and her company as part of our judges’ panel for this year’s poetry contest!
Please help us welcome The Ink Refill to the team!
If you are on Instagram, please head over to @theinkrefill and show her some love!
We have more shout-outs to give. Stay glued.
Reminder: This year’s poetry contest is accepting submissions from now to June 1st!
Theme: “What We’re Carrying Now.”
This theme explores personal loss, collective memory, survival, and the emotional weight of living in today’s world. Through this contest, we are not only uplifting poets, but we are also creating space for community storytelling, reflection, and connection through the arts.
Today, we are rolling out some of the amazing poets who are helping with this year’s contest. Up first is Joshua Clark.
Joshua Clark, who goes by Roses, is a Dallas-based spoken word poet, creative specialist, and Texas Chapter Leader of the Poetry Business Network.
He is the CEO of Sculpted Roses Company (@sculptedrosescompany), where his team offers mental health and creative writing workshops, poetry sessions, and public speaking engagements.
We are proud to have Roses and his company as part of our judging panel for this year’s poetry contest!
Please help us welcome Sculpted Roses Company to the team!
If you are on Instagram, please head over to @sculptedrosescompany and show this brother some love!
We have more shout-outs to give. Stay glued.
Reminder: This year’s poetry contest is accepting submissions from now to June 1st!
Theme: “What We’re Carrying Now.”
This theme explores personal loss, collective memory, survival, and the emotional weight of living in today’s world. Through this contest, we are not only uplifting poets, but we are also creating space for community storytelling, reflection, and connection through the arts.
We are pleased to announce that this year’s poetry contest is now open! Submissions will remain open until June 1, 2026.
Entry: Email Subscription (Free)*
*If you are already subscribed, you can skip this step.
Theme: “What We’re Carrying Now.”
This year’s theme centers on personal loss, collective memory, survival, endurance, and/or the emotional weight of living in today’s social and political climate.
This year, we are asking poets to create a living archive of how they are processing, surviving, and making meaning in this moment in history.
What are you carrying this season? What are we carrying now?
People knew his father and what he had contributed to the movement. They still spoke Joseph’s name with a kind of reverence, as though saying it might conjure the courage of another time. His photograph—creased at the corners, and yellowed with time, hung in barbershops and church foyers, beside posters for fish fries and gospel concerts.
Every February, Joseph’s face reappeared on classroom walls, a reminder of marches and megaphones, of a generation that refused to bow. For the community, Joseph was history come to life.
For Michael, he was just Dad.
Michael and his friends walked past the bulletin board in the school hallway. There it was again: his father’s face, eyes sharp, mouth set like a promise. Michael paused, thinking about his first days at Lindbloom.
“Ey, Mike! Mike!” a classmate had called. “Yo man, so how is it being famous? What was it like?”
Today, he would tell the person to go to hell, but back then, he just shook his head, a small, polite refusal that spoke louder than words.
Michael kept walking, shoulders tight, mind elsewhere, like the chess match he had lost last night. If he had not been hungover, his opponent would not have stood a chance. He didn’t particularly enjoy the taste of liquor, but it got his mind off thinking about walking in a legend’s shadow.
Tanya carried the legacy easily, quoting speeches and smiling at cameras as if born for the stage. But Michael kept to the edges. He wanted to be noticed for his own quiet triumphs—for the way his mind worked over a chessboard, or how the basketball arced perfectly from his fingertips.
Instead, people only ever asked about “The Movement,” their eyes expectant, as if he held some sacred story he refused to tell.
His father’s name was everywhere, in every conversation, every display, every “remember when” retold by people who seemed to think history lived only in him. Not in Michael. Not in the quiet hours he spent imagining, planning, thinking. They acted like he was Martin Luther King’s son.
So what, his father took part in the Freedom Rides? What did that have to do with him? Michael didn’t care about no Barack Obama either. He wasn’t his Savior. He was just another politician. He swallowed hard, tasting the bitterness of being overlooked for the wrong reasons.
History had chosen him without asking, which is why he couldn’t admit to his friends or himself that he had a crush on a white girl.
Tanya McNair, dressed in her favorite navy-blue blouse, which bore a faint trace of glitter from the campaign rally a month ago, moved from group to group of the crowded apartment. Her living room was alive with chatter, laughter, and the occasional burst of applause from friends and neighbors whenever a commentator announced another state leaning toward Obama. Tanya looked fondly at the old TV set sitting on the floor beneath the big, flat-screen they were all watching.
The floor model television belonged to her grandmother, Sidney McNair—Mama Sidney to everyone who knew her. Uncle Eddy had bought it after great-grandma Judith passed, back when he and his sisters decided to remain in Chicago a while longer. That was also around the time her father, Joseph, disappeared into what he later called a revolution of self-discovery, also known as abandoning the family until he found himself.
The television had been there through it all.
It was the same set where great-grandma Judith—daughter of the great Solomon, son of the first Stella—watched the Black Panthers march down the street in their berets and rifles, demanding the freedom of Huey Newton.
The same screen that flickered quietly in the corner the day Aunt Karen’s boyfriend, Noah, stormed into their lives. Years later, she would name their first and only son after him.
For Tanya, it wasn’t just a piece of furniture but a sacred repository for memories, a portal to her family’s history.
Tanya frowned at the stacks of books on top of it, wondering if she was disrespecting her grandmother by using her TV as a table.
A cheer erupted from the room as the phone rang. Tanya’s heart raced as she ran to answer it without taking her eyes off the flatscreen. So far, Obama was winning.
“Sisss,” sang her little brother.
Tanya raised her eyebrows, “Are you drunk already, Mike?”
“Nah. I’m good. What’s the word?”
Tanya sighed, “Michael, you are not good. I can smell the Hennessy through the phone.”
Mike burst into laughter, and Tanya pulled the phone from her ear. That boy was gonna make her go deaf. “Where are you anyway?”
“I’m handling some business. Why, what’s good?”
“The business you were supposed to be handling is here. What happened to you helping me with the party?”
“The election party? You know I don’t get into alla that,” he said, slurring his words.
“Well, you need to get into it. History is being made. Have you talked with Dad?”
“History? Yea okay. Nah. I ain’t spoke to him today.”
“He was supposed to be coming over.”
“Coming over where?”
“Over here, to the apartment.”
“Not today, he ain’t. He told me he was working on the Malibu.”
“That beat-up old thing?” Tanya sighed. “And I thought you ain’t talk to him?”
“Look, pops don’t wanna hurt yo feelings, but you know the old man don’t vote.”
It didn’t make sense to her. Joseph McNair was born in 1945 and grew up in the ’60s at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. He had heard Dr. King speak, fought segregation with his friends through protest, and was even beaten for trying to integrate at a bus station during the Freedom Rides.
Finding out he really was a mixed Black man and not the white boy he grew up believing himself to be is a history lesson all its own.
And now, as the country waited with bated breath to see if the United States really would elect its first Black President, her father, the revolutionary of the family, didn’t participate in politics?
Joseph McNair was politics!
“Yo T, you there?”
Michael’s voice startled Tanya back to the present, her heart beating a million miles per minute as her guests sat on their hands, quietly waiting on the biggest announcement of their time, the walls echoing with hope.
Meeting Mrs. Sarah Collins Rudolph, the lone survivor of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, 1963
The more I study Black history, the more I am humbled by how close it still is to us, and how often the past breathes in the same rooms we do. It lives in the hands of my elderly aunts and uncles, in my husband’s great-aunts now in their eighties and nineties, in the quiet authority of people who remember a world entirely unlike the one we inhabit today.
When I look at them, I am struck not just by their age but by the eras they have survived. Even my late parents, born in the 1940s and 1950s, moved through a country so different from the one I know that it feels almost unrecognizable. I used to think that world was gone, and in many ways, it is. And at the same time, it is also sitting across from us at dinner tables, folding laundry, telling stories we don’t always ask to hear.
This is what makes Black history (and history in general) so accessible and so urgent. It is not only found in textbooks, memorials, museums, or the names etched into stone. It is carried by people who are still alive. People whose memories collapse the distance between then and now. It reminds us that history is not just the past, but it is also inextricably connected to the present. Those who made history were simply living their lives, never knowing their present moment would one day be named.
This weekend is the perfect example of this.
On February 7, 2026, I had the esteemed honor of meeting a woman whose story should have been in our history books, but the world barely remembers her name.
On September 15, 1963, the distance between past and present collapsed in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. A bomb exploded beneath the church steps, ripping through a space that had long been a place for organizing and for Black resistance. In 1963, Sixteenth Street was the largest Black church in Birmingham, a heartbeat of the Civil Rights Movement.
History often tells this story in a single, devastating sentence: four little girls were killed. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley (between the ages of eleven and fourteen) lost their lives in an act of white supremacist terror. Their names are remembered, mourned, and rightly so.
What is mentioned less often is that there were five girls in that basement lounge that morning. Addie Mae’s sister, Sarah, was also there. She lived, but survival came at a cost that would follow her for the rest of her life.
Twelve-year-old Sarah Collins Rudolph was standing nearby when the bomb went off. The blast hurled shards of glass into her body, leaving her immediately blind in both eyes. Though she eventually regained partial sight in her left eye, her right eye was so severely damaged that it had to be removed and replaced with a prosthetic. Tiny fragments of glass remained embedded in her skin, even in her eye.
“If a single strand of hair got into my right eye socket, the pain was unreal,” she says, “The skin around my eye was very sore and still healing. It felt like something was cutting my eyes whenever hair or anything sensitive brushed over this area. The hair itself felt like tiny particles of glass stuck inside my eye socket all over again.”
– Mrs. Sarah Collins Rudolph
Sarah did not die in that basement, but she carried September 15, 1963, with her into adulthood, into older age, into the present we are still living in.
With no counseling or therapy, Sarah was forced to return to school as she struggled to heal, grieve the loss of her sister, and her old life. The world moved on. Dr. King spoke at the joint funeral for three of the girls, and it attracted over eight thousand people. Photographer Frank Dandridge took a picture of Sarah while she lay in the hospital, with patches over both eyes, and it was published in Life Magazine on September 27, 1963.
However, despite this searing image, Sarah Collins Rudolph and what happened to her faded from public consciousness, limiting her story to nothing more than a historical footnote.
It was only when Mrs. Rudolph herself felt compelled to share this story that the world began to learn about the part of that tragic day that had not been told before.
Today, Mrs. Rudolph is a social justice speaker, author, and activist speaking to people all over about what happened to her and why stories like hers matter.
The PBS Blog 