In reading Ferlinghetti’s work, I started to believe that maybe a voice like mine deserved to be inside of books, too. Then, when I was in community college, after years of academic floundering, my younger sister handed me a book called Poetry as Insurgent Art. I was more likely to cut class and play video games. When I was a teen, reading the words of old white men was far from anything I’d do. It was in the world - doing graffiti and freestyling rap lyrics in the South Bay where I grew up, a first-generation Mexican American. My introduction to poetry wasn’t in books. That fellowship gave me a full ride to USF’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing program, and it opened a door to me and to others like me - people to whom the doors of higher education had long been shut. I was selected as the second-ever Ferlinghetti Fellow in 2015. And in 2012 he inspired the Lawrence Ferlinghetti Poetry Fellowship at the University of San Francisco. For more than 60 years Ferlinghetti championed writers outside the mainstream.
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