"YOU SAY I DON'T KNOW THAT I'M BEAUTIFUL,
BUT WHAT IF I DID...
WHAT IF I LOOKED IN THE MIRROR AND ACTUALLY
LIKED WHAT I SAW
MAKEUP OR NO MAKEUP
FLAWS AND ALL?"
- DAYSHA VERONICA
WHAT IF I KNEW I WAS BEAUTIFUL
What If I Knew I Was A Queen...
Daysha performing a poem at an open mic night in college (2012).
Still from I Am Not That Girl (2015).
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Daysha Veronica (also known as Daysha Veronica Edewi) is a passionate writer and performer of poetry. She has been writing poems since she first learned to write, and discovered her deep love for spoken word poetry during a summer college preparedness program in high school. She formed the first spoken word club at her high school, and performed at open mics during her first few years of college. After college, she was recruited by BuzzFeed, and began producing her poems into videos. She pioneered the standard for how to approach making viral spoken word videos at BuzzFeed. Her most viral spoken word video, What I Wish Someone Told Me About Having Sex/Safe Sex, had over 30 million views across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in its first week of being released (32 million coming from Facebook alone), secured the #1 spot on the BuzzFeed top trending articles list, received a Best of 2015 badge for videos produced that year at BuzzFeed, destroyed internal benchmarks for native Twitter video views at BF, and currently has over 1 million shares on Facebook, with people still sharing it daily. Note from Daysha: I know I've been on a hiatus (for very important reasons), but don't think I haven't been writing! I can't wait to share my new poems with y'all! So make sure you subscribe to the email list to be the first to know when each poem drops! In love, peace, and unapologetic fierceness, <3 Daysha |
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BUZZFEED
While working at BuzzFeed, I got the opportunity to create videos around poems I had written. This is a collection of all the poems and their video versions. This body of work deals with themes around self-esteem, body acceptance, self-love, unhealthy relationships, family, love, and reaffirming one's power. |
Still from Things I Wish I Could Tell My Mom/Dear Mama (2015).
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#RESISTENCE
Labeling the 2016-2017 time period as "contentious" is probably one of the biggest understatements I'll ever write. Between the saga that was the election, boiling racial/ethnic tensions, and the huge divide between women of all races, sizes, and classes that became far more apparent after the results of the election, I feel like the word that best embodies this point in time is "resistance." What does it mean to resist something? And what exactly are we choosing to resist? Why do we do it? How do we do it? How do we know we are effective in our efforts? How do we define what's the "good" side vs the "bad" side when figuring out what to resist? I wanted to create a body of work that captures not only the complex emotions I've had over the past year, but also use the medium I love most to dig a little deeper into the idea of what it means to resist, and articulate what I am choosing to resist in 2018 and beyond.
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DAYSHA'S TUMBLR
If you want more background behind the poems, GIFS, behind-the-scenes photos from video shoots, and so much more, follow Daysha on Tumblr!
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Still from Let it Out (2015).
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