In the heart of Detroit, on the side of Yoshi Hibachi Grille on Livernois Avenue, a splash of color interrupts the otherwise ordinary landscape. The mural, depicting youthful figures engaged in reading, writing and performing, celebrates 30 years of youth expression in Detroit. Fittingly, its centerpiece is a quote from 18-year-old student poet, Charisma Holly: “In the Detroit City, the D has always been for dreams.”
For Holly, now a Pulitzer Center-recognized, PBS-featured writer who debuted the poem at 16 during the 2024 Detroit Homecoming, it was the culmination of a decades-long love story with her craft.
“I’ve been writing since I knew what rhyming words were,” says Holly. From noticing the “literary art” of words in a birthday card to the “rhythmic” speaking of her elementary school principal, Holly’s world has always been filled with the music of language. Following her interest in high school, Holly joined a poetry group led by InsideOut Literary Arts, the largest and oldest literary nonprofit organization in Detroit. “It has just snowballed from there,” Holly concludes.
Since then, Holly has traveled everywhere from Saginaw to Kentucky with InsideOut’s Citywide Poets program and Youth Performance Troupe. But Holly’s home base remains her hometown of Detroit, bearing witness to her performances at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum of Contemporary Arts, the Wright Museum and more, where she draws inspiration from the Detroit city of “opportunity and so much art engraved in its heartbeats.”
“I write to bring inspiration,” she states. As Holly recites in her poem “Aim Higher,” “This journey is a story that has yet to be told / and we are the writers who will determine how it will unfold.”
“I sent [that poem] to one of my friends and he told me after he read it, he actually quit his job,” Holly recalls. “And he said, ‘you changed my life.’”
“That’s when I knew exactly why I wanted to do poetry,” Holly concludes. “When it comes to performance poetry, you get to piece together all of the different elements of what you get to visually see and what you get to audibly hear, and it just creates this very immersive experience that is connecting the people who are performing and the people who are experiencing and watching.”
Reflecting on her now decade-long writing journey, Holly’s most profound lesson is on confidence. “From another mentor, Edmund Allen Jones, I learned that the word confidence means ‘with trust in myself.’ That is the Latin root that it comes from,” she explains. “And if you do things that make you feel good and other people around you are able to shed some of that light or share some of that light, that is the path to follow.”
