![]() ![]() Growing up in Compton, California, Lewis didn’t know of many options aside from being a nurse or a post-office worker. “And if I’d known I could have done art history, I would have done that. “I think that if someone told me I could have been a visual artist, I might have been a visual artist instead,” she says. Lewis is now pursuing a doctorate in poetry and visual studies at the University of Southern California, making up for lost time by doing all the things she didn’t know she could do when she was younger. “It was this huge epiphany – ‘Oh, this is what poetry is! You can put an entire essay into one line!’ It was odd but it was the greatest gift, and I never looked back.” ![]() ![]() “I would sit there for eight hours a day thinking of one line and it became delicious,” Lewis says. ![]() While the act of physically writing something made her sick, the act of thinking did not. “I decided, ‘OK, if it’s one line a day, it’s going to be a goddamned good line.’” “My neurologist told me, ‘You can only write one sentence and read one sentence a day,’” she says. Lewis had to do speech-language therapy and stop reading and writing. Things changed after she was in an accident that caused permanent brain damage and kept her in bed for two years. ![]()
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