World News Australia
October 9, 2012
He’s Mexican, Muslim, a poet and a distinguished Professor at the
Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University. When asked
what he ‘does for a living’ he recites in verse, “I’m a poet, I’m an
innovator, I use culture to leverage social power, to heal historical
trauma and shift public discourse”.
Unifying his Latino culture with the principles of Islam, Mark is said
to be part of a new breed in the US of first generation Muslim converts
“making waves”. Born into a Roman Catholic Latino family he converted to
Islam in his early twenties.
“For me, the religion I was born into stopped speaking to my soul in my
late teens. I started sitting with and speaking to different communities
and cultures in order to have a better understanding on what road or
spirituality fit my soul better. I found that in Islam”, he says.
Now 37, he lectures in the power of “spoken word” at Stanford and
travels the world educating on how to build stronger communities through
culture.
His YouTube videos are viewed in the thousands and he frequently trends
on Twitter. This performance at the first ever TEDx Ramallah event put
him “on the radar”, so to speak.
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