TEDxDU - Your Voice is a Weapon

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Spoken word poet Jose Guerrero got his start by completing an “I am” poem in a high school workshop. He and collaborator Eli Lynch teach the gift of poetry in schools around Denver. Jose Guerrero knows the power of words. Jose Guerrero doesn’t mince words. He turns them over, lifts them up and spits them out at his audience with spirit and conviction and tang. He says words are a weapon. But not like a bomb. No, more like chemotherapy that fights something ugly and leaves something healed in its wake.

Guerrero says he found his voice through poetry — the voice of a single father, the voice of a “brown” man. A voice he’s shared on HBO and in Denver clubs and in community poetry workshops. A voice that riffs and rhymes, that finds cracks of truth and busts them wide. A voice that grabs people by the guts and yanks them right out of their seats. “If we really want to, we can make our voices be heard,” he told the TEDxDU 2011 audience.