Omari Spellman jokes with people when he is asked how it all began.



“I call it my eighth-grade crisis,” Spellman said.



Spellman wouldn’t divulge the details on what his eighth-grade crisis consisted of, but he needed an outlet to express his thoughts. That’s where his love of poetry began.



“I used poetry as a way to yell to let go of all that frustration and all of the things that were bottled up,” he said. “I could just get it out on paper. I might not even read it again. I just got it out on paper. That was how I coped with what I was going through.”



Poetry has been a fixture in Spellman’s life since then. Whenever he’s going through a rough patch or even when he has a thought that he feels is worth writing down, Spellman whips out his phone and types. He estimates that there are somewhere between 100 to 200 poems currently on his phone.



The poetry hasn’t stopped since he...