Noelia Cerna starting writing poetry after her eighth grade English teacher at Central Junior High introduced it in an emergency unit as a "tool to grieve."
Her poem, "I Carry You," after the e.e. cummings poem, "i carry your heart with me," centers on hope.
"Creation keeps you bound to your humanity," she says. "It's hard to not notice things around you when you're creating, and I feel like a lot of that empathy, a lot of compassion can be traced back to that art of noticing."
