Kayla's poem "Dust" won first place in the June 2016 issue.
She is a junior at the Milken Community School in Los Angeles, California.​
This is her first entry into The Bedford Ledger, along with two other masterful poems, "Jacaranda" and "Dream"

Tell us a little about yourself.
     My father is from Iran, and my mother is from Scotland. Throw in the tension between my American and Jewish identities and it becomes easier to explain the difficulty I’ve experienced in navigating and reconciling my identity’s different cultural components. As I’ve gotten older, this issue has come to the forefront of my struggles and consequently, my writing and discussions with other people.
      I’m the oldest child. I’ve accepted the fact that my younger brother, Aaron, will always be cooler and funnier than me. He has real life experiences for story material, and I have Creative Writing. I write for my school’s literary journal and newspaper and run on my school’s track and field and cross country teams. This year, I was appointed as a judge to my school’s Student Judiciary Council. You can find me outside or, during the school year, inside studying and dreaming of being outside.

When did you first start writing poetry?
     In 3rd grade, I wrote my first poem (although I consider middle school to be the time when I first started writing poetry). My first poem was about sunsets and candle flames. Words spilled out of me, and I remember writing 2 or 3 poems in one sitting during class. It felt natural. I stood in line each time a poem was done, waiting for my teacher’s revisions. She called me a poet, and since it differentiated me and sounded cool, I adopted the title for the day very proudly-- and then forgot it.
     In 7th grade, we wrote vignettes and experimented with symbolism and language. They were inspired by Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street. Her tone and writing style inspired me as I wrote about my Bat Mitzvah, my grandfather’s death, and my own home.
     One year later, in 8th grade, we had a poetry unit in our Humanities class, where I learned about specific types of poetry, as well as different literary devices/terms . My teacher first introduced poetry to our class with Langston Hughes’ “A Dream Deferred.” The poem introduced me to the power of words, to the feelings that simple images (such as crusty sugar or heavy burdening loads) can evoke. The culmination of the unit was the April Poetry Slam. At the event, I read my sonnet, “Bijan.” It was about my great uncle’s passing and my first time visiting his apartment. I consider “Bijan” to be my first “serious” poem, and that night was my first time sharing something so personal and abstract (and that wasn’t in narrative form). The poem revealed to me my blossoming potential as a writer.

Who or what inspires your love for writing/poetry?
​     I think I’ve always found writing enjoyable and considered it an easy outlet for self-expression. While my love for writing is self-generated by my own interests, nature/people/places//feelings (both new and old) inspire the subjects of my writing. In more recent years, my school’s Creative Writing program and my mentor, Ms. Mansfield, have taught me how to harness my inspiration and creativity and develop my own voice. Ms. Mansfield’s, and consequently, the program’s, strong support for all student-writers have given me the confidence to read and share my work with others, as well as the confidence to continue to write.

Do you have any favorite poets or poems that you like to read or have influenced your style of writing?
     The House on Mango Street and Beloved both made me feel like I was reading extended poems because of their language and structure. While they’re not poems, they’ve both broadened my understanding of the many forms/structures that storytelling can take and of the richness that just the right phrasing or word pairing can bring to a story.
     I love Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.” Her voice is so sincere: “tell me your despair, and I will tell you mine.” Her sincerity seeps into all of her images. I love Rahel’s “El Artzi.” I had first read it in Israel a year ago, and we just had a guest lecturer in class reteach it. I connect to Rachel’s poems personally because she talks about her relationship with Israel, often discussing the spirituality versus the physicality of the state and the concept of home. Shohleh Wolpe also visited our class a few weeks ago. She’s an Iranian poet and a lot of her poetry focuses on her identity as an Iranian American. Her collection of poems, Rooftops of Tehran, and her poem “Honor” resonated with the Iranian half of me.

Give us some background on your writing - do you only write poetry? Do you write for pleasure? Have you won any other contests?
     I don’t just write poetry. In middle school and for the first half of high school, I mainly wrote and got attention for my analytical essays in English class. This year, along with essays for school, I’ve been writing and publishing personal articles on my own. My first one was “My White Noise,” comparing the different frequencies of my Jewish identity to the undifferentiated frequencies of white noise. My second article, “Why I Didn’t Go To Coachella,” discusses media distortion and the paradox of bohemian conformity. I can’t get myself to journal on a daily basis, but I do when I travel. I just returned from the Peruvian Amazon with my school and have 60 pages of inspiration to work with.
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What was the inspiration or the story behind your winning poem?
​     My poem, “Dust,” was inspired by the human life cycle. Dust represents both birth and death since we were crafted from the dust of the earth and will return back to the ground after passing. But dust is not limited to represent humans. It represents the life and death of all things-- even inspiration. We get inspired by others, we forget them, we inspire others and they forget us. It becomes difficult for us to reconcile our earthliness and physical beings (who we are) with our spiritual aspirations for the future (who we want to be), to reconcile our quest for community/connection/tradition with our quest for individuality and distinction. That is the essential struggle I was trying to capture.