Poetry Performances
One of the activities that I am involved in this year is CCRF, or Creative Campus Residential Fellows. It’s a living-learning community in which we promote creativity on campus and around Nashville. As an engineer, I love getting the chance to be creative (although you could argue that problem-solving is creativity). We also are always looking for fun things around campus to attend as a group.
This past week we went to an event as a group entitled Daniel Beaty: Transforming Pain into Power. Daniel Beaty is an actor, singer, and playwright. The night was sponsored by Vanderbilt Spoken Word, and before Daniel Beaty went up a couple of the VSW students performed their poetry. In high school, I was on the speech team, so listening to students perform definitely brought me back to those days. I had forgotten how much I enjoy speech. I was also amazed at how talented my fellow students are! They performed original poems, all of which were incredible.
After the Vanderbilt students performed, Daniel Beaty came on stage. Listening to Daniel Beaty’s story was definitely inspiring. His father was a drug dealer and ended up in jail when he was a child. Beaty went on to attend Yale and is currently a professor at Columbia. He alternated between telling us about his life and performing acts from a play that he had written based on his life. I enjoyed how he was able to write about his life and turn it into art and something that people could appreciate. He was quite a talented performer and overall, I really enjoyed the night.
This event definitely made me want to attend more events that Vanderbilt sponsors. It seems like there is always something going on around campus. Vanderbilt regularly brings in such interesting performers and professionals, which are events I want to start taking advantage of.