User:Emhart34/Evaluate an Article

Evaluation of the Warsan Shire Wikipedia Article

 * Warsan Shire: Warsan Shire

Lead
Warsan Shire FRSL (born 1 August 1988) is a British writer, poet, editor and teacher, who was born to Somali parents in Kenya. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize, chosen from a shortlist of six candidates out of a total 655 entries. Her words "No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark", from the poem "Conversations about Home (at a deportation center)", have been called "a rallying call for refugees and their advocates".

Lead evaluation

 * The lead is concise and includes important biographical information such as DOB, nationality, career, and relevance.
 * However, while accurate, the remainder of the information presented in the lead appears extraneous or perhaps convoluted. An explanation of one of the many award which Shire received, but is not known for, precedes a brief explanation of the poem that Shire is known for and its significance in a global context.

Life[ edit]
Born on 1 August 1988 in Kenya to Somali parents, Shire migrated with her family to the United Kingdom at the age of one. She has four siblings. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing. As of 2015, she primarily resides in Los Angeles, California.

In 2011, she released Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth, a poetry pamphlet published by Flipped eye. Her full collection was released in 2016, also through flipped eye.

Shire has read her poetry in various artistic venues throughout the world, including in the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, North America, South Africa and Kenya. Her poems have been published in various literary publications, including Poetry Review, Magma and Wasafiri. Additionally, Shire's verse has been featured in the collections Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011), Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014), and New Daughters of Africa (edited by Margaret Busby, 2019). Her poetry has also been translated into a number of languages, including Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish and Estonian.

As of 2016, Shire is working on her first full-length poetry collection, having put out a limited-release pamphlet called Her Blue Body in 2015. She serves as the poetry editor at SPOOK magazine and she teaches poetry workshops both globally and online for cathartic and aesthetic purposes.

Shire's poetry featured prominently in Beyoncé's 2016 feature-length film Lemonade. Knowles-Carter's interest in using Shire's work was sparked with Shire's piece "For Women Who Are Difficult to Love".

Influences[ edit]
Shire uses not only her own personal experiences but also the experiences of people to whom she is close. She is quoted as saying: "I either know, or I am, every person I have written about, for or as. But I do imagine them in their most intimate settings." Her main interest is writing about and for people who are generally not heard otherwise, e.g. immigrants and refugees as well as other marginalized groups of people. Shire is also quoted as saying: "I also navigate a lot through memory, my memories and other people's memories, trying to essentially just make sense of stuff." As a first-generation immigrant, she has used her poetry to connect with her home country of Somalia, which she has never been to. She uses this position as an immigrant herself to convey the lives of these peoples. Shire utilizes the influences of her close relatives, and family members and their experiences to depict in her poetry the struggles that they have all faced.

Awards and honours
Shire has received various awards for her art. In April 2013, she was presented with Brunel University's inaugural African Poetry Prize, an award earmarked for poets who have yet to publish a full-length poetry collection. She was chosen from a shortlist of six candidates out of a total 655 entries.

In October 2013, Shire was selected from a shortlist of six as the first Young Poet Laureate for London. The honour is part of the London Legacy Development Corporation's Spoke programme, which focuses on promoting arts and culture in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and the surrounding area.

In 2014, Shire was also chosen as poet-in-residence of Queensland, Australia, liaising with the Aboriginal Centre for Performing Arts over a six-week period.

In June 2018 Shire was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.

Works

 * Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth (Flipped eye, 2011), ISBN 1905233299
 * Her Blue Body (flap pamphlet series, Flipped eye, 2015), ISBN 978-1905233489
 * Poems including "The Unbearable Weight of Staying", "Dear Moon", "How to Wear Your Mother's Lipstick", "Nail Technician as Palm Reader", and "For Women Who Are Difficult to Love" featured on Lemonade: A Visual Album by Beyoncé (2016)
 * Penguin Modern Poets 3: Your Family, Your Body by Malika Booker, Sharon Olds, Warsan Shire (Penguin, 2017). ISBN 0141984023

See also[ edit]

 * Unless the Water is Safer than the Land

Content evaluation

 * The section titles are relevant given the biographical content.
 * The "Life" section may be improved by elaborating on Shire's experience as a refugee, which is merely alluded to in the article's current form. The use of the phrase "Shire migrated with her family to the United Kingdom" may mistakenly provide readers with the impression that Shire was an immigrant who left her country by choice, rather than a displaced refugee. Additionally, it does not name the university at which Shire pursued her degree within the body of the text.
 * While Life section does include some relevant and helpful information on Shire's body of work, it contains gaps concerning her childhood and early career. Given that Shire credits her life experiences, especially her childhood, as formative influences for her poetry, it would be helpful if the article was expanded to include more information on this topic.
 * Although the Influences section makes up for many of the shortcomings in the Life section, perhaps parts of it could have been collated with the life section to provide a more complete picture of the overlap between Shire's life and her subject matter.
 * The Awards and Honors and Works sections are relevant, updated, and chronologically organized.
 * Overall, the content appears to have been kept up to date within the last five years, but could benefit from some refreshing sometime in the next 1-2 years.
 * Perhaps a section or at least a few more sentences explaining Shire's cultural impact within either the content or lead would round out this article. The See Also section was a helpful first step towards this goal.

Tone and Balance

 * This article is neutral; it covers Shire's involvement with advocacy and social justice without becoming an advocacy piece of its own.
 * If anything, this article errs too much on the side of caution and does not provide enough information about the causes and work that Shire is involved with.

Sources and References

 * The sources and references are reliable sources of information. Many are prominent interviews with Shire herself from trusted newspapers such as The New York Times and The Guardian that can be backed up by reliable secondary sources like the BBC.
 * The sources are all current (within the last 10 years).
 * The article is annotated with references to reliable sources throughout.
 * The links are updated and working.
 * The sources are thorough and reflect the available information on Shire.

Organization

 * The article is concise, clear, and easy to read. The style is exceedingly direct and focused.
 * This article contains no apparent spelling or grammar errors.
 * The organization is logical and makes sense given the nature of the subject matter.

Images and Media

 * This article contains no images. It could benefit from including at least one picture of Shire.

Checking the talk page

 * There's no active talk on this article. There is only one comment in this chat's history noting the need to update Shire's move to California in 2015.
 * It is unilaterally rated start-class and low-importance, but relevant to WikiProject Biography, WikiProject Poetry, WikiProject Women writers, and WikiProject Somalia.


 * Wikipedia, unlike our class discussions, does not put Shire's work within a larger global context. It is harder to gauge the themes of Shire's work and their relevance.

Overall impressions

 * The information this article does include is strong, verified and well-presented information. However, this article is incomplete and underdeveloped. It would benefit from the addition of well captioned images and additional biographical information on Shire, as well as a broader context explaining her relevance.
 * The article describes and organizes Shire's body of work and list of honors/awards neatly and clearly in an informative way. It provides an uninformed reader with a good general sense of who Shire is, but ultimately fails to capture her significance.