by Andrea Loring

On August 26, 2011 SIATech at Homestead Job Corps Center had a special guest speaker. Mr. Elliot Jones, Director of Community Engagement at the Miami Children’s Initiative, spent the afternoon in the English lab.  He read some of his favorite poems written by his very famous grandmother, Maya Angelou.  He shared her philosophy and some favorite stories about her, mesmerizing the students.  

He asked that students share some of their own poetry, which they were asked to bring to class.  A couple of students “free-styled” rap lyrics that they wrote.  The students were required to stand up when they spoke and to “own their voices.” 

Mr. Jones talked to the students about resiliency and told them that Maya Angelou was a poor black female growing up in the segregated South.  Before she was seventeen, she was raped by a family member, traumatized so that she didn’t speak for years, turned in desperation to prostitution, and became a teen mother.  From this, she rose to be among the most respected poets in the country.  Through verse and discussion, he told the students that they too could rise and succeed.

Our eyes filled with tears at the sorrowful poems he read, and we laughed when Ms. Marie Pharel and Ms. Andrea Loring did a dramatic reading of “Phenomenal Woman” and bombarded him with questions about the scholarship foundation that Maya Angelou sponsors for students who attend historically black colleges and universities.

Ms. Pharel said it best when she told our guest that “he embodied the message of his legendary grandmother, who said that poetry is music for the voice.” 

Andrea Loring is the principal at SIATech Homestead.