Adina Burke

We stumbled upon Adina Burke by her feature on Button Poetry, one of our favorite MPLS poet communities. Adina’s raw, unbridled messages are powerful on the page and even more so to hear from her mouth. After hearing her weave some words, we reached out to Adina to hear a little bit more of her story.

I started storytelling as a child, and it grew from there. Some of my earliest memories are telling my sister Raychel, stories before bed and she had her favorites, so I obviously had to write them down, and that's what Spoken Word is. It's an art of storytelling. I used to play basement shows for shits and giggles when I was in college, because that's just what you do when you don't know what you're doing. You start a punk band, eventually that kinda fell apart and I got back into writing again, but I missed performing and I thought, "If Patti Smith can do it, so can I." and shoved myself back onto stage, trembling with words I'd written on a napkin at an open mic I'd never been to, and that's when I was reminded of the fact that stories aren't just meant to be told, or read. They're meant to be felt.

Anger is something that nobody likes to talk about feeling, and that may be my inner punk talking, but I believe that's what drives the majority of my work. I work in a scene where anger is being talked about, minority voices both literally-and figuratively, have the mic and that's what feeds my work. Addressing the anger and furthering conversation. In fact, being around local creators is one of my favorite things to do. You're more than likely to spot me at a local show or poetry reading.

Speaking of readings, you can see Adina live at Mager's and Quinn Booksellers on August 18th from 7-8PM.
You can find more of her work on her Easystand page, or check her out on Instagram and Facebook.

It's important that we don't just hear each other, but we listen to each other.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Adina, we’ll continue listening to your words.