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Leaves of paint tessellate a young woman’s face as she looks straight ahead. The word “Milagro” jumps out in light pink, surrounded by a murky sea of blue. “Milagro” is a soon-to-be-published chapbook, a small collection of poetry, written by Penelope M. Alegria ’24.
Originally from the Chicago area, Alegria moved to the suburbs when she was 12 years old. “It was a really big shift. I used to go to this all-Hispanic bilingual school and then, suddenly, I moved into this predominantly white high school,” Alegria says. She turned to writing to “sort through” complicated feelings over her new situation, “but they weren’t really poems.”
Alegria first fell in love with poetry in the eighth grade. During a lesson on slam poetry, her teacher showed the class a documentary called “Louder Than a Bomb,” which follows four slam teens as they traverse a competition. Slam poetry is a competition-based form of spoken word poetry that often involves energetic and dramatic performances before live audiences. Louder Than a Bomb is the largest youth poetry festival in the world, bringing over 500 youth poets together to perform, workshop, and learn. “I just looked at that and I was like: I want to do that. I want to be on that stage. If they can do it, why can’t I?” Alegria says.
Alegria later joined her high school’s slam team. “The first time I went to a slam poetry meeting, they just ripped my poem apart — it was terrible,” she says. “But it was really good that they did that. I had never gotten criticism like that before.”
Throughout high school, Alegria sought out further opportunities. She turned to Young Chicago Authors, a nonprofit that offers creative writing programming for teens and adults; it also organizes the annual “Louder Than a Bomb” festival. There, she attended intensive summer writing workshops where she worked to hone her craft. The “intensives” were led by poetry mentors Kevin Coval, the founder of “Louder Than a Bomb,” and Jamila Woods, acclaimed singer-songwriter-poet. “It was through those writing workshops that I ended up coming up with a lot of my poems,” she says.
Every year, the Young Chicago Authors organization selects a new Chicago Youth Poet Laureate from the students in their artistic programs to serve as an ambassador. The Chicago Youth Poet Laureate develops a chapbook in collaboration with Haymarket Books, an independent, nonprofit publishing offshoot of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change.
When Alegria was named Chicago’s Youth Poet Laureate for 2019-2020, the organizers told her “that Haymarket Books would be committed to publishing my chapbook by the end of the year,” she says. This offered a chance for Alegria to consolidate all the poems she’d written since her freshman year into one place.
The chapbook, titled “Milagro” — Alegria’s middle name, which is Spanish for miracle — recounts her parents’ immigration from Peru to the United States through their perspectives as well as her own. The chapbook reflects on the generational consequences of immigration, emphasizing Alegria’s experiences as a first-generation American.
“Originally, I wanted my collection to be about my mom and retelling family stories through her perspective, but when I sat down to write the collection, I didn’t want my chapbook to just be about that,” she says. Alegria still aimed to explore her own experiences in her work, and the chapbook eventually extended beyond a collection “exclusively about [her] mother.”
For Alegria, publishing “Milagro” is more than just another accomplishment — it’s a milestone. Growing up in a household without cable meant that she relied heavily on books for entertainment throughout her childhood “I always wanted to write something and have it be out in the world,” she says. “I was thinking of self-publishing, but I didn’t know how to navigate that space. When I got the opportunity to publish it through Haymarket, it was just — it’s very surreal to hold something that you created in your hands. It’s been wonderful.”
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Beyond the publication of “Milagro,” Alegria’s tenure as the Chicago Youth Poet Laureate has exposed her to various opportunities to share her work. Last October, she was invited to perform at the Obama Foundation summit. “I usually don’t get nervous for gigs, but I was really, really nervous,” she says. At the dress rehearsal, she forgot her lines. “I was panicking. I was like: ‘I memorized this. I don’t understand why it’s not coming out of my mouth.’”
Despite her momentary stage fright, Alegria made it through the performance. Co-performing with a close friend and collaborating with Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet Company made the event especially memorable. “We got to interact with some dancers and create this visual interpretation of the poem, which was really awesome to see,” she says.
Despite juggling classes and extracurriculars during these chaotic times, Alegria has continued to do what she loves. Currently, she is a contributing writer for TheCrimson’s Arts Board, where she recently began a poetry column called “Hers.” She envisions “Hers” as a series of poems centering the experiences of her mother. “It’s more in line with what the original collection was supposed to be for the chapbook,” she says. Alegria has also begun stepping out of her comfort zone and “branch[ing] out into other literary genres like screenwriting and prose.”
When asked about her most memorable performance, Alegria recalls a poem she wrote as a sophomore in high school about her father getting pulled over on the South Side of Chicago. The poem is titled “Papa’s Deli Order,” and it details her father’s experience as an immigrant struggling to understand English.
“I translate all of my poems for my parents because they don’t understand English,” she says. “I translated [“Papa’s Deli Order”] into Spanish, and they saw me perform it after they understood what the poem was about, and I remember them crying after.”
For Alegria, poetry offers a lens by which to understand a complex sea of feelings. “Poetry has given me a space to explore who I am,” she says. “I felt a lot of pressure from my parents that I had to be something because they immigrated here for me. I felt like I had to pay back a debt and I didn’t really know if anybody else felt the same.”
“To speak my thoughts into existence — there’s something really comforting about putting what’s in your head on the page.”
