As a grade-schooler, Troy Osaki had already accepted that his dream career as a musician wasn’t going to pan out. His love of Blink-182 and Taking Back Sunday couldn’t make up for his inability to keep a rhythm—or sing, for that matter. Osaki, who is Filipino and Japanese American, later turned to spoken-word poetry while he was a student at Garfield High School, eventually signing up for Cafe Allegro’s open-mic poetry night and finding a writing community at Youth Speaks Seattle, a youth literary arts organization.
Poetry became a source of therapy for Osaki after five teenagers were fatally shot in Seattle in 2008, one of whom was 16-year-old Quincy Coleman, a Garfield High School student gunned down on campus. “I began to learn how poetry can be used as a tool to reflect and process what is difficult and complicated to understand,” Osaki said. “I now write in hopes of building a safe and just place to live by reimagining the world through poetry.”
