Q is short for Quartez. 
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Residing in Cleveland, Ohio, Quartez Harris was once a second-grade teacher in Cleveland Public City Schools. Harris is the Ohio Poetry Association's 2021 Poet of the Year. Harris is the author of We Made It To School Alive, a full-length collection of poems published by Twelve Arts Press, and Nothing, But Skin, a poetry collection published in 2014 by Writing Knights Press.  He is the first recipient of the Barbara Smith Writer-In-Resident at Twelve Literary Arts and a 2020 Baldwin House Fellow.  His poetry and ideas have been featured in The Plain Dealer, Ideastream, and City Club of Cleveland. Harris is represented by McKinnon Literary Agency. His works in progress are two picture books and a middle-grade novel.​​

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We Made It to School Alive was inspired by Quartez Harris' work as a teacher and gives voice to the experiences of the children he works with every day who deal with structural barriers, intergenerational poverty, educational negligence and more.
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​"You will find yourself submerged into Quartez's poetry because it is a story you think you know until  you read his words. His writing is fearless because it has to be; he is writing from the pain and trauma systematically inflicted on the bodies of students of color within the walls of school buildings around the US...The field of education needs Quartez Harris' work more than ever to explain the margins that need to be at the center." 
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-Dr. Bettina Love
Beyond the brilliance of his imagery, and the potency of metaphor, what Quartez Harris offers in We Made It To School Alive is a continuation in the legacy of black storytelling. He is a generous and thoughtful narrator – an archivist of not only vulnerable landscapes, but also the noble people traversing them. This book is a brilliant force for the uplift of young black folks, and the people who love them

-Hanif Abdurraqib