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The community of Unalaska is a busy place to live. Our community calendar is full of events and activities. About Town is your source for coverage of community events and sports. KUCB staff writes many of the stories, but we also accept contributions from community members for this section of our website. If you'd like to submit a story to About Town, send it to info@kucb.org.

Slam Poets Work With Unalaska English Students

Zydneigh Earnshaw

Two slam poets arrived here in Unalaska last Monday to work with Unalaska high school English students.

Students from Ms. Rudio’s class made the march down to Mrs. Purevsuren’s classroom to form an amoeba of young writers, all of the same grade level. For the first activity of the day, the students got up from their round tables, mingled about the room and formed a circle where they formed pairs and had to introduce their partner using only facts. Then, the other partner reciprocated but this time, introducing with only lies. This led to some pretty wild first impressions.

The poets, never having been to Unalaska, had a lot of truth to catch up on during their short retreat. Their focus for the three days they were here was on perception, to peel back the layers of our personalities and start conversations in our communities. Poetic or not, a conversation was their goal.

In their words, they wanted to find “our truth”.

The visiting poets were learning something new about the students every session, which is to be expected. However, by the second class, it was evident that students were learning new things too, about their oftentimes lifelong classmates.

On the last day, Wednesday, classes were given their first prompt to write an actual poem. It was, “You may think I’m (this), but really, I’m (this).”Brave recitations were given, and classmates uncustomarily clapped (not snapped). Kudos was given both out loud and silently in classmates’ heads. What most impressed however was that the visiting poets had started a legitimate conversation.

For that, Unalaska students say come back any time!

Brian Conwell provided student reporting for KUCB in 2016 and 2017, when he was a student at Unalaska City School District.
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