In the new episode of ON BEING, "Your Life Is a Poem," poet Naomi Shihab Nye talks about growing up in Ferguson, Missouri and on the road between Ramallah and Jerusalem. Her father was a refugee Palestinian journalist, and through her poetry, she carries forward his hopeful passion, his insistence, that language must be a way out of cycles of animosity.

Your life is a poem. This is how the poet Naomi Shihab Nye sees the world, and she teaches how that way of being and writing is possible. She�s engaged the real world power of words through her upbringing between her father�s Palestinian homeland and Ferguson, Missouri. Her mother was American. Her father was a refugee journalist, and she carries forward his hopeful passion, his insistence, that language must be a way out of cycles of revenge and animosity. A poem she wrote called �Kindness,� that was written in a moment of trauma, is carried around in the pockets and memories of readers around the world.

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