Excerpt from “Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (And the World Listens)”
One day in high school, while on a field trip to Sac State for an African-American student leadership conference [Dre-T] stumbled upon a Sacramento Area Youth Speaks workshop. He was immediately hooked.
As the group of teens shouted their poems from every corner of the room in a guerilla poetry spectacle called Griots (which are an ancient West African tradition that S.A.Y.S has adopted) Tillman was captivated. “I’d always been hungry for knowledge,” he explained, “S.A.Y.S had the food for the thought I was starving for and they knew I was hungry.”
