Jantae Spencer

Throughout her undergraduate years, and now as a graduate student completing her M.A. and M.F.A. in creative writing, 27-year-old Jantae Spencer has been telling stories. Stories about gangs. About her times in jail. About her daughter, Shantasia, born when Jantae was 17 and a junior in high school.

"Shantasia saved me," says Jantae. "When my baby was born, I whispered to her, ?You are not going to go through what I am going through.' It's going to be different." Jantae--the first in her family to attend college--came to Columbia to find a new world, to make a better place. And here, she found her voice. Big time.

It's ironic, in a way. When Jantae arrived here, she was afraid to speak, afraid to be heard. Her freshman year she sat, quiet, eyes cast down, at the back of the classroom. "I had never been in a classroom full of white people," she says. She grew up on Chicago's South Side, and like other people in her community, the only Caucasians she encountered were police officers, shop owners, teachers: "authority figures who didn't always want me to talk back."

"So, when I came here," she admits, "I thought I wasn't smart enough to talk with white people. I thought I didn't have anything to say." She was wrong. At Columbia, she started speaking up--and writing it down. And she hasn't stopped. Her words cascade from her, jagged with passion, ragged with anger about communities jacked up with drugs and violence, dragged down by poverty and disappointment. She is an evangelist of opportunity. "God put me here to teach, to teach my community," she says. "That's what I was born for: to bring change to my community."

Jantae uses her stories to reach out to kids who, like her, have stories to tell but no forum in which to speak, no opportunity to be heard. "Kids hear the confidence when I talk. When I do hip-hop. I don't worry about how it's coming out," she says. "They know what I'm saying comes from experience, experience like theirs."

Her stories ring true, like those of her father. He told stories, stories filled with life, unpolished and unformed, but bursting with passion and power. And that's what Jantae has been doing at Columbia for seven years.

When she graduates, Jantae Spencer wants to create "survival schools for low-income communities, places where teaching is done the way it should be done." The way she learned at Columbia. "I am writing to change the world," she says. "I am writing because writers teach the power of story to transform expectations."