Do you ever have imposter moments?

Last weekend, I was a guest writer at a DayEight (a nonprofit that supports local poets and young writers through the District) workshop for teen girls in Washington, D.C. I am not an academic, and I am not a teacher by profession.

I took time to review the exhibit material, Pictures of Belonging, that the students would be looking through before the workshop portion of the class at the National Portrait Gallery. With the hard lessons of WWII and the incarceration camps for the Japanese one focal point of the collection, I thought I could bring some text to share from fiction and poetry regarding the immigrant experience. I marked passages, thought about what I would say, offer some recommendations on books the teens could read to learn more, particularly Camp Nine (Amazon, Bookshop.org), which is told from a young girl’s perspective.