Meysha Harville, a teacher at Cleveland, has had her poetry career take off in a way she never imagined. She has been writing and performing slam poetry for six years now, and after creating her video “Writing Myself Alive,” she was scouted by an art organization known as Raw Artists, who are now pleased to promote her.

Raw Artists was searching for new poets to introduce to the community, and after searching through google and other sources, they happened to stumble upon her video and were hooked. They reached out to her videographer, wanted to feature her, and ended up coming into contact with her.

The poetry video, “Writing Myself Alive,” is what got her the feature. To Harville, the video is all about “how healing poetry is for me. It’s been about writing my story and how so many things in life have felt like the end or death, and how writing has helped me to keep going to find my reason, to get the feelings out there, and to also show other people that you are to the lowest of the lows sometimes. It’s just writing it out that could help sometimes. It’s having someone hear you, even if it’s through some creative method like a poem or a song.” It’s her commitment and willingness to let herself go that makes her poetry so interesting and compelling.

Raw Artists have decided to have her video open up the Portland Artist Showcase on Dec. 15 at the Roseland Theater. She has little idea of what to expect. She’s going to screen her “Writing Myself Alive” video, a second one that she recently filmed at the school, and then she will come out and perform one of her poems live. “I just hope I get to expose people to my words and have people maybe relate to what I write and hopefully get to meet some more creative people to form some writing groups and collaborate,” she explained. There are usually 800 to 1000 people that attend these events, so she is expecting to perform for a full house.

You have to be 21 years of age to be an audience member, but Harville is hoping students will spread the event around to those who are of age. Her manager is promoting her on his Facebook, but they are mostly relying on word of mouth to gain attention about the event and to increase the amount of views online.

This is just the beginning of her poetry career. She wants to further it and continue writing and performing, not just for an audience, but for herself. “I’m just gonna keep writing, keep writing, keep writing. I like to think of that song from Hamilton because of course I love musicals… ‘Nonstop,’ the song ‘Nonstop,’ which is like: keep writing like I’m running out of time because maybe, at some point, my words will impact someone positively.”

Her goal is to inspire her students to be themselves and to stand up with their words. “I hope that [students] will learn that their words have power, that they matter, especially because so many people write and don’t get heard. So I hope that just by me, Ms. Harville, who is no one, having someone choose to showcase my work, it will show them that you can be as ordinary as me, as ordinary as a boring teacher and have someone care about what you write.”

Poetry really speaks to Harville and allows her voice to be heard through creativity. She wants to influence students and others to speak their mind through poetry, and she hopes that she could be the one to inspire people to do just that.