Crystal Williams is a badass. A writer of poetry, the current president of Rhode Island School of Design, initiator of DEI improvements through student-facing programs, grants, and dedicated leadership at different education institutions…such a badass. And I am so inspired.

A great delight in discovering her work is the multi-level inspiration I am experiencing. I learn of all she’s done and I am inspired to understand her footsteps to make my own. I read her poems and I am inspired to visit Detroit, to visit Seattle with new eyes, to visit the very idea of home in all of its complex offering and wanting.

I felt the offering and wanting in her poems. Particularly Detroit as Barn, where the expected moment of collapse of something that visually seems to be at its end held a forgotten truth, that what was used to build it is formidable. Find it in the good wood, the family’s strong backs, homemade libation in celebration of the barn standing. There was something wanting in the derelict state the present characters looked upon. It might crumble at any second, but it still offers so much because it was built in offerings: of time, energy, love, community. And because of that, it might stay alive longer than can be imagined.