The Power of Words. Stanley Banks is a poet. He’s published five books and won countless honors including the Langston Hughes Prize for Poetry. He’s also a professor at Avila University. But before all that and still, in your heart, you are the treasured grandson of a bootlegger grandmother. I write a lot about my grandmother, Georgia. She was a bootlegger but held the family together. She held the neighborhood at 10th and Vine together. I’ve had people, all races, say she sounds like their grandmother, or they wish their grandmother was like that. Forget telling me that you like my rhythm and the technical stuff, that’s the best compliment. My grandmother was always telling me that I was going to be somebody. To everybody else I was just a sloppy little kid. She was speaking me into existence. When I went to
college, people would say “Boy! Georgia said it about you, and, hey, you actually did it.” You know, I’ve said before, when they make my tombstone, whatever else it says, it has to start with “the grandson of Georgia Banks.” In addition to being a poet, you are a teacher. Teachers have a special place in your life, don’t they? Eleventh grade at Southeast High school changed my life. The teachers lifted me up. Ms. Gale in Current Affairs gave me freedom to be creative. I am still in touch with her to this day. She’s like a surrogate mother to me. Another teacher, Ms. Kizine, had the nerve to teach Shakespeare to a bunch of inner-city Black kids. Macbeth! “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.” I was the idiot! I didn’t have a plan. It made me realize I had to find my way.
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