US student Vanessa Tahay stands out from the other teenagers in her school.Her skin is dark and her accent is thick. If you ask her, she will tell you these are the things she is proudest of. Tahay is a poet, and at 18 she was considered among the best in Los Angeles. When she is on the stage, audiences often go silent. They also laugh, shout and cry.But this doesn’t come easily for someone who comes from a village that sits at the base of a huge mountain range in Central America.When she first appeared at school, she was teased by others for being short and different.She never spoke, so they called her “mouse” . “How do I defend myself?” Tahay thought.“I don’t know how.” “Keep going,” her mother would tell her. “At some point, you’ll learn.” She spent hours after school and on weekends watching the same DVD: English Without Barriers . Tahay’s elder brother, Elmer, persuaded her to go to the after­school poetry club. In the last six years, her English teacher Laurie Kurnick has turned Cleveland Charter High School’s poetry program into one of the most respected in the city.Her team draws from the likes of D . H.Laurence, Pat Mora and Kendrick Lamar to create poems about their own lives. The poems focus on many things — some funny, some painful. The first time Tahay read the group’s poems, she was wild with joy. “I wish I could write like that,” she thought.“I want to say something.” She wrote her first poem about her first year in America. She called it Invisible . The day her turn came to recite poems in front of the team, she broke down crying. She cried for 15 minutes.“I had so much held in,” Tahay said.“I couldn’t even finish it.” But she kept at it despite her less­than­perfect grammar, spelling and diction ( 措辞 ). Still, she wouldn’t tell her friends about her poetry because she worried they would make fun of her. But with time, her poems changed her. “They gave me pride,” Tahay said. “They told me that I’m worth something.” “She had this innocence,” Kurnick said. “This willingness to be genuine shows you things you don’t ever see.”