Biography
Cassandra Myers is a queer, trans, crip, mad, South Asian-Italian poet, performer, educator, and social worker from Toronto, Ontario. They have performed poetry across the United States and Canada. A Pink Door Fellow, their work can be found in Overheard, The Shortline Review, UncommonYOU, and elsewhere. Cassandra is know for spoken word poetry, performance, lyric, and ekphrasis poetry.
Micro-interview
Yes I did read poetry in highschool! The poem that I loved in highschool was "Chops" from Perks of Being a Wallflower.
I first started writing poetry in grade 12 for a writers craft class where I did my first spoken word poem and then once i came to university in Toronto I found a spoken word community that welcomed me and emboldened me to keep writing. It was there that I became involved in the youth poetry community internationally attending festivals such as Brave New Voices, Youth Can Slam, and the College Union Poetry Slam Invitational.
In the words of Mary Oliver "to belong deeply to themselves" and once you belong deeply to yourself that's the kind of work that changes the world.
I wrote it on a boat at the lake just feeling so much joy. Being with my cousin and everything in the poem is a live depiction of the event that I was experiencing in that moment. Just noticing the way that we as brown mixed kids often feel like we don't have a community to belong to -- we are inbetween worlds. In this bay on the lake we belonged to each other. The only way my masculinity and my browness and my ability needed to be validated was by water, the sky, the trees, and my own blood. And that was a haven from all the voices elsewhere in the world telling me I'm not enough.
I would memorize "aubade for the BPD subreddit user who wrote can people with BPD love?"