Integrate poetry, spoken word, hip-hop and slam into daily lessons. Use metaphor as a magic wand to transform the mundane to the miraculous. Read, hear and analyze exemplary authors and emcees alongside the fresh text of students’ stories. Brew intersecting identities into a heart and brain storm of words. Organize a student spoken word showcase or slams.

Anton Kot, Salwa Abdussabur and Janice Landry join me in trying to demonstrate how Adolescents Use Hip-Hop and Poetry to Transform from Objects into Subjects for the 2019 Inaugural Max Ritvo ‘13 and Alan B. Slifka ’51 Lecture.

Is it useful to preach from the choir? Should socially conscious theatre incite introspection, or action? Does “art for social change” really change anyone? If you keep interrupting a hip-hop play with interactive audience dialogues, will the audience leave? We grapple with these and other existential questions as I perform excerpts of works in progress.

Why do we do the work we do? How does our “Why” connect to our own identities and the identities of those we serve? What masks do we wear in a health care setting, and how might art unmask ourselves and our patients? Through written and spoken word, our personal narratives and values will challenge our own, our colleagues’, and our patients' stories of who we are.

Create poems and raps exploring our own and our families' histories, personal moments in which we become aware of race, and ways in which our selves are constricted or liberated within these narratives. Through written and then spoken word, we challenge and shift how our racial stories and identities interact with those of our students and colleagues.

Can expressive writing shift how adolescent patients and their caregivers perceive themselves and each other? How subtly can we communicate identity and feeling? An audience of doctors and other health care workers witness writing as a cultivator of emotional awareness in patients, then attempt to become

author-ities (the author of their own stories) via impromptu poetry creation.

Linking audience interaction with hip-hop poems about my own misadventures with race as a student and teacher, I invite us to liberate our people together - as soon as we can figure out who they are. How is race constructed in each of us – our selves and our institutions? How can we free ourselves from the power dynamics race and racism were created to maintain?

30 performers - including the cast of me and Byron Au Yong's (Be)longing - join me to interrogate the wild ways in which intention and effect converge and diverge in the work of building community and social justice through art. A keynote and conversation on "being a transformational artist" ends with the audience creating and performing rapped manifestos.