Student Writers Celebrate Our Humanity

Have you ever had an idea?

If you are like most people, you probably have had an idea before.

In fact, you might even have a number of ideas every day.  Maybe even a large number.

Things you think.  Things you notice.  Funny ideas, sad ideas, disturbing ideas, and even ideas about your ideas.

If you are like most people, the idea comes and goes, and then that is the lifespan of the idea.

If you are like the student writers featured in Groundswell 2026, however, you do something different.

You stop whatever else you are doing and you write the idea down.  And then you keep writing, until the idea starts to grow and evolve and find a shape to live in.

Now your idea has become a thing – it’s a poem, a short story, a personal narrative.  Instead of sinking back down into nothingness, it sticks.  It stays.  It occupies space in the world, and it becomes something that other people can experience, so that it not only sticks and stays, but it reproduces itself in other people’s minds and lives, diversifies, ramifies, expands, explodes, and changes the world.

A recent event hosted by the University of Bridgeport’s UB RISE, an exposition of the creative accomplishments of the UB community, featured a panel of eight student writers whose work was published in the latest issue of Groundswell, UB’s long-running annual compendium of student-generated art and literature.  The writers read from their work and answered questions from the audience about what inspires them, their feelings about AI-generated writing, and the impact they want their writing to have.

Editor-in-Chief Emily Ortiz said that her driving motivation in bringing these writers together was the imperative of telling authentic stories and celebrating the voices of individual human beings, especially in a time when so many voices are being silenced, disempowered, and undervalued.  She proposed that creating something new is “the most human thing” a person can do.

Editor-in-Chief Ortiz’s success in accomplishing her goal was exemplified by the variety, intricacy, and individuality evident in the contributors’ work.  Hailey Tirado’s haunting poem about the onset of alcoholic dependency, Elias Lopez’s short story about trying to survive in a dungeon, CJ Rodriguez’s comic fable about ninja mice, Nyla Blackmon and Tayshaun Bookal’s love poems, Angelise Melendez’s poetic reflections about feeling like a ghost in the month of October, Edival Rios’s magical-realist tale about a flying grandmother – all of these texts are alive with the identities of the people who wrote them, their histories, their relationships, their perspectives, their personalities.

Groundswell 2026 is physical evidence of the creative power that makes us human.  By writing down their ideas, putting their thoughts and feelings into words, sharing their words with a global community, these writers have made our world a richer, more interesting place. 

It’s almost like the earth itself has become a little bigger, more expansive, more unfolded.  Maybe that’s what Dick Allen, the late Connecticut poet laureate and UB professor, meant when he titled the magazine Groundswell.  We live on an earth that has been enlarged, enriched, seeded, swollen by the novelty, beauty, and invention expressed in these writers' voices.

And now it’s your turn. 

What idea did you have today?

Stop what you’re doing and write it down.

Keep writing until your idea finds its voice, its geometry, its physiognomy.

There.  Don’t you feel ever so slightly more human?

Groundswell 2026 contributors discuss their work. From left to right: Hailey Tirado, Edival Rios, Elias Lopez, Emily Ortiz, Nyla Blackmon, Tayshaun Bookal, Angelise Melendez, and CJ Rodriguez

The University of Bridgeport celebrates its annual UB RISE event to showcase the depth and breadth of UB faculty, staff, and student research and exhibit our innovation, scholarship, and entrepreneurship.