ALIYA HALL, 17

Aliya Hall is from Grand Rapids Michigan and believes that youth are the future and are capable of absolutely anything. She hopes that youth will come together and help better our community and the world and take any necessary actions to make a difference.

Hall’s passion for writing crystallized in the seventh grade, but it had always been an escape. Her goal is to entertain, teach, and connect with the reader. She always hopes that her short nonfiction stories and poems have an impact on someone's life or even just add to someone's day. Hall loves to write about most things in her daily life such as school, being a teen, beauty, family, her childhood, or sports.

Hall joined Grand Rapids Creative Youth Center (CYC), a youth-centered arts nonprofit, during her freshman year of high school. Her writing has been published in CYC’s anthologies Dear Monster, Dear World: The Book of Explosions VII and The Book of Explosions VIII. Hall will soon be the youngest member of Hook A Sista Up (HASU), a local networking group focused on female entrepreneurship, collaboration. She has attended the Women Who Write Conference several times, the first time as the youngest attendee with a writing portfolio. The second year, Hall represented CYC on the vendor side talking about the books that CYC students have written and how the organization’s programs work.

Hall plans to attend an historically black college or university and to pursue writing and entrepreneurship. Her current goal is to publish a book of her own before she graduates from high school.

Hawk Island Girl

- After Eve L. Ewing’s “To the Notebook Kid”

by Aliya Hall

Quick change Girl

one hand out of your shirt

one leg out of your shorts

pulling the water suit over your neck Girl.

Ssssliding the rusted white van door open

Hot sss Hot Hot Girl

bouncing from foot to foot like a pogo stick Girl.

Laughter on the playground

smiles arriving on faces,

running to the worn-out tire,

dragging momma by the fingers Girl.

Chills going down your back

swimming like a fish Girl.

Free Girl.

Underwater with silence

it brings you peace Girl.

Ropes trying to stop you

green water grass slime all over you

gets scared of every moment Girl.

Volley ball pit stings with hit,

thumps on the water pad,

bikes swooshing past

the wind whistles in your ears Girl.

Girl surrounded by so much but yet so little

so amazed Girl.

Lunch under the roof at the holey tables

dropping chips for the birds to snack

Girl.

Fingers get stuck in the crack Girl

running to be back in the water

back to the green grass slime

back to dragging momma by the fingertips.

It’s time to leave Girl.

We will be back again

but we have to let the hawk

sleep on its island.