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““I don’t want to sound corny, but I think, in a lot of ways, art, not just spoken word, has seriously saved my life on a couple of occasions,” says Kelsey Van Ert x’11, a poet and singer from St. Paul, Minnesota, who is African-American, white, and Latina. She first visited Madison in 2005, when she won an adult poetry slam contest, and is now one of half a dozen First Wave students who are the first in their families to go to college. Without First Wave, she says, she wouldn’t have considered enrolling at a “huge school” like UW-Madison. “That sense of community [will] really help me stay focused in my studies,” she says. ”
