NPR

'This Is Our Dream': A Crowdsourced Poem To Inspire Hope

NPR poet-in-residence Kwame Alexander's latest community poem started with a request to consider what follows after the words "I dream a world."
Source: Newsday LLC

Poetry can help us become more human. We saw it on display as 22-year-old inaugural poet Amanda Gorman read her stirring poem "The Hill We Climb" last week. It felt joyous and truthful, necessary and hopeful, and there was power in both her and her words.

Gorman's Inauguration Day poem no doubt helped inspire submissions to Morning Edition's most recent poetry callout. Days before she read those lines, Kwame Alexander, NPR's poet in residence, asked for poetry that starts with the words "I dream a world." That line comes from a poem by Langston Hughes and it inspired Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.

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