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April 13, 2023

Grace Yu is a first year student at Northwestern University. In her free time, she enjoys reading, playing music and making origami. She has been published in Taking Our Place in History: The Girls Write Now 2020 Anthology, as well as her high school’s art and literature magazines. In the Emerging Poets category for the 2022 ruth weiss Foundation Awards, Grace was selected as a finalist for her poem “Love Story,” an homage to the stunning diversity of oceanic life.

This story took place in United States

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In partnership with Girls Write Now, Channel Kindness held a poetry contest entitled “Art of Kindness.” Below is an excerpt of one of the contest’s honorable mentions, a poem written by Grace Yu. You can read the entire poem on the Girls Write Now website.

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You do not expect
the kindness. It comes
in splashes, like an outpour
after a long drought. It was
Tuesday, and raining.
It often was. That night,
the sidewalks were leaping —
Manhattan’s scrubbed grass,
dry and parched, had found
space to breathe quietly
in the wet dirt. That night,
I inhaled the dampness,
the scent of petrichor, the mud
seeping into my thin shoes and
the rain dripping through
my soaked hood. I shivered
slowly under the dark, passing through
the windows of department stores,
lightheaded, wandering through
an array of bread, a stack
of thick winter coats. That night,

Read the full poem on the Girls Write Now site.

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