Lexington has its first youth poet laureate. See why this 14-year-old was chosen.

Olaoluwakiitan (Kiitan) Adedeji, a 14-year-old Lafayette High School student who is both in a pre-engineering program and the School for the Creative and Performing Arts, has been named Lexington’s first youth poet laureate.

Kiitan was born in Montreal, Canada, and her family is Nigerian. She has always liked to express herself when she feels that it was important to do so.

When she was 5 or 6 years old living in Canada, she came home one day worried that everybody was talking about her hair, said her father Akinbode Adedeji.

He told her to be proud of it.

“We all are uniquely endowed so we should be proud of who we are, irrespective of how people perceive us,” Akinbode Adedeji said.

Kiitan moved to Kentucky from in January 2015, continuing second grade at Glendover Elementary School. She entered the newly established Garrett Morgan Elementary School in third grade after her family moved to the east side of Lexington.

She was admitted in to the Gifted and Accelerated Program for fifth grade and switched to Ashland Elementary School and continued in the program at Tates Creek Middle School.

She chose to attend Lafayette High because of the SCAPA program that offer courses in creative writing, Adedeji said.

She formulates her poems by thinking about her ideas for a while before writing them down. “Then I go back and edit them to my liking,” Kiitan said.

At school, she is able to balance the technical side of her interests with the creative ones.

“I do creative things through SCAPA and explore more technical interests through the pre-engineering program at my school,” she said.

‘The Cage’

Kiitan read her poem called “The Cage” at the Monday Fayette County Public School Board meeting. Superintendent Demetrus Liggins called the poem “deep and very powerful.”

“To them

my hair had grown out

off the top of my head

and used its tight coils

to build a cage around me.

Making an exotic animal

kept in a cage

thousands of miles away from its home.

They reach into the depths of my cage

to touch my coils

for a feel of my exoticness.

I had never built my cage

only living in it.

Unable to muster the courage

to move the image away from their minds

I’d let them examine me as a specimen

I was exotic,

because every time I looked outside of my cage

I saw carbon copies

pale people looking at me, mouth agape

as I let them claw through my fur

tarnishing myself with it.”

Kiitan and three other finalists presented their work Dec. 3 at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.

“(She) was chosen for her community activism and her distinctive and unique poetic voice. She will ably represent the perspective of the youth in our city,” Jamari Turner, coordinator of the Lexington Youth Poet Laureate Program, said in a Fayette schools news release.

“I have found that one of the best ways to capture my experiences is through poetry,” Kiitan said in the news release. “By reading other Black Kentucky poets like Crystal Wilkinson and Bernard Clay, I can set a standard for how I want to use poetry to express my identity. With poetry, I can find the heart of something, and with each poem, I can discover something new within my Black experience.”

“My wife (Bisoye Adedeji) and I, we are incredibly proud of her,” said Adedeji. “Our daughter has always been a very thoughtful young lady. We know that she is gifted and talented.”

“I think my poems provide insight into the way I see myself,” Kiitan said.

The other finalists — Aileen Khosravi of Paul Laurence Dunbar High School and Lafayette’s Lillian Bramble and Sophie Watson — will serve as ambassadors to Lexington’s cultures of poetry and literature, a news release said.