Ankober Yewondwossen
Aki Kurose Middle School, Alan T. Sugiyama High School
Ankober is an Ethiopian first-gen fortunate to be born in Seattle & creatively raised by the Seattle Hip Hop scene at the height of its renaissance. Surrounded by a milieu of ingenious, burgeoning artist-groups from Hella Dope to theeSatisfaction; it was Hip Hop, and the Hidmo, which cultivated her pedagogy for community & critical race theory, while grounding her in the ultimate tenet of the art form—being true to oneself. A legacy student of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, North Carolina; she studied non-fiction writing while pursuing a self-designed major in Womanist Spiritual Quest—melding her love for Plato’s Republic with Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf”. Previous apprentice roles include a Monastic Apprenticeship in the Garifuna populated region of Honduras where, while living in a Quaker nunnery, she surveyed and studied the intersections of writing & spirituality. Ankober believes writing, in its highest form, is prayer, and, as Paulo Freire once said “there is, in fact, no teaching without learning”. You can find her 11 year old poetry blog at ankober.wordpress.com and her essays on Medium.com.