“I remember being in elementary school, stuck inside the library during recess. I felt like the only kid in my class with my nose in a book. I wished I could share that experience with other people. Being an English student at SFSU has taught me that the world is bigger then the one inside my head: that my love and appreciation for English is shared. There is a whole class full of people who love to read. English has taken root, allowing us to grow and flourish.”

“[My] Grandpa Rob….spent his life as a musician. He and my grandma even traveled across the country in a van with shag carpet and a cat. Very classic 70s. On one drive home, I was sitting quietly while the radio played a song I loved. Rob asked why I wasn’t singing along, and I said ‘I can’t sing. You’re the musician, you can do it’. Grandpa told me, ‘It doesn’t matter if you can sing, it matters that you do it anyway’. I think about it all the time. Cause the most meaningful things we ever do begin before confidence arrives. To participate is messy but can be oh so joyful.”

“We read a text not only to determine what it means but to participate in the emergence of meaning: to see ourselves seeing, and so to see differently. The study of literature teaches us to remain open to the possibilities in things as well as to our own possibilities. When we read together, we encounter the potential in each other and make our shared potential the basis for community. This program has shown me that reading is not a solitary pursuit, but a way of being together, and I am forever grateful to all of you for being here with me.”

To close our graduation program and send off our graduates, Leah chose to read Ada Limón’s “Instructions on Not Giving Up”.