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= Sasha Banks (poet) = Sasha Banks, the poet, is an African American writer, poet, activist and creator of the organization Poets for Ferguson. Her parents are from the south, her father is specifically from Greenwood, Mississippi. She was born in Ohio and bounced to several different places such as Alaska and California. She currently resides in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York.

For her undergraduate degree, she majored in creative writing at Wesleyan University in Fort Worth, Texas and graduated in 2012. She has an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and has received a number of awards and publications in several magazines and newsletters. A lot of her work has appeared in many different magazines like RHINO, The Collagist, Poor Claudia, Kinfolks Quarterly, PBS Newshour, B O D Y Literature, Austin IPF, OBSIDIAN and performed in Tulane University’s Vagina Monologues. She also won the Button Poetry Chapbook prize in 2013.

Her activism began when she made the foundation Poets for Ferguson. She began this foundation after the young, black teenager Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri by white officer Darren Wilson. She felt the need to create this organization to spread the word of police brutality through poetry and words that would help move the people around her. She wanted to give a voice to the voiceless. Banks said, “I think what poetry has the power to do is to put a voice to something, to make something real just by naming it. There’s so much power and validation in being able to speak on something, and a lot of people don’t know they have shared experiences unless they hear someone else talking about it” during an interview with PBS news. During this interview with PBS news, she claims that her poetry is a protest. This is her nonviolent way of getting her word out and helping the people of her community. She also does some feminist work to try and help the women around her.

Some of her most read works are “uhmareka, post collapse:” series, “Pretty Girl Mouth”, “Turn”, and “Sasha Fells the Wildwood”. Her poems touch the subject on femininity and racial discrimination specifically in the United States.