2006 Graduation Speaker
Chris Henrikson is an Artist and Activist

After graduating from Duke, Chris Henrikson, Milton Academy Class of 1985, joined the ranks of talented writers seeking bright futures in Los Angeles. Still a poet and a writer today, Chris has spent more than 10 years developing a successful non-profit organization dedicated to using the creative process as a force for personal transformation and social change.

In 1995, Chris began teaching a poetry workshop in the Los Angeles County Juvenile Detention system for incarcerated boys from 14–18 years old, at Camp Fred Miller; since then he has worked with at-risk youth in the juvenile detention system and social service placement facilities, helping them to discover and develop their voices as writers, artists and human beings. He has successfully supported these young people in their efforts to use the skills and increased self-esteem engendered through the arts to build positive futures for themselves.

Chris’s organization, Street Poets Incorporated, was formerly known as Dreamyard/L.A. It provides workshops throughout Southern California area that inspire young people to develop their own artistic voices through poetry, acting improvisation, playwriting, visual art, dance, movement and performance. In addition, Street Poets Incorporated offers a job program that helps workshop alumni with real-world work after they return to the community, a mentoring program that pairs students with artists and professionals, a poetry performance group called Street Poets United and Community Open-Mic events which bring together different racial, ethnic and socio-economic segments of the city.

As Chris wrote in a Milton Magazine article in 2004, “My students are what one might call ‘extreme teenagers.’ Their typical teenage rebelliousness is amplified to levels well beyond those of the average high school student. Most come from severely broken homes and impoverished neighborhoods and have defaulted to gang membership for some sense of belonging and control over their own lives. They are the children of refugees who fled the killing fields of Southeast Asia and Central America. They are the children of black and Latino inner-city communities and white high-desert communities devastated by drugs and economic job loss. They are the children of fathers dead, imprisoned or otherwise missing-in-action. They are victims and perpetrators, addicts and dealers, schemers and dreamers, and, once you get past the surface, they are desperate to find a way out of the self-destructive lifestyles they’ve chosen for themselves.”

Chris connects these boys with a process that requires courage, introspection, honesty and art. “Poems born from these journeys, he says, “become like streetlights leading the poets out of the darkness of their own minds. …Over the years, I’ve been privileged to witness many dramatic personal transformations as a direct result of this creative process.”

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