Our Story
Get Lit was founded in 2006 after Diane Luby Lane created a one-woman show about the power of books and toured colleges, high schools, jails, and detention centers, with iconic Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. After the show closed she couldn’t bear the thought of cutting off the work completely. She started teaching classic and spoken word poetry in three high schools: Fairfax, Fremont, and Walt Whitman Continuation. When the semester ended... the students wouldn’t leave. They insisted on meeting after school. The rest is history. Today, the curriculum has expanded to over 100 schools throughout California, and is sold to schools all over the world. Get Lit’s poetic ambassadors, The Get Lit Players, are the most watched poets on the internet with over 350 million online views…
Words Are Powerful
Walter, one of our graduated Get Lit players, studied Langston Hughes with Get Lit in prep for the Classic Slam, Get Lit’s annual culminating festival for the in-school program...a journey that took him all the way to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, Hughes's alma mater. He was the first to attend college in his family. Now he stars as Virgil in the play, Dante and is a show contributor to the hit Netflix show, On My Block.
Check out Walter’s story in a short documentary by Youth Speaks called “The Drop-In.”
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