By Houston Williams, Walnut Grove High School, Prosper, Texas
Arts are a way that many people escape reality, allowing people the opportunity to live their own words. The arts and the written word are important to Kylee Crisswell, an 18-year-old from Yukon.
“I like that you have power in your voice when you perform,” said Kylee, who will be a freshman at Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri this fall for graphic design and creative writing.
She explained that the application process was strange because she had anxiety. Eventually a friend ended up just telling her to send it and she did just that. Had Kylee not branched outside of her comfort zone and pushed herself past her limits, she may have not received an academic scholarship that paid half of her tuition.
Kylee has been around artists her whole life, so it’s no surprise that she became a writer. She fell in love with writing around age 12. When Kylee was little her grandfather played guitar and sang to her, but her real inspiration was her mom who has been writing poems since before Kylee was born.
“I find poems to be artistic,” she said.
She said that her mom used poetry as a coping mechanism, often not censoring some hard topics, and this is why she doesn’t censor the stuff she writes. In the sixth grade she was in a poetry club her teacher started, which allowed her to open up to people, ultimately helping her to make new friends and strong connections.
Aside from writing, Kylee also expressed that she has a passion for graphic design. She implements graphic design into her poems by color theory and syntax structure. She explained that she likes to make her poems paint a picture in people’s heads to find a bit of relatability with her readers. In high school she was in a creative writing club which allowed her to further her writing skills, for example by editing the newspaper for her school, creating an art page in her school’s yearbook, and assisting heavily in her teacher’s journalism class. This all led Kylee to build a strong resume and portfolio to not only enter art school, but receive that scholarship.
As for the next step, she wants to follow the path of journalism.
“I think about it like another form of storytelling,” Kylee said.
