Florida State University's Karlanna Lewis is not your average student, for starter, a professionally trained dancer double majored in creative writing and Russian and is now taking graduate level courses.
And did I mention she did all of this by the age of twenty?
"If you don't try for something, you're never going to get anything."
A true academic, her first love remains dance.
"If anything is, you know, bothering
or going like on kind of
chaotic
"It's always a huge passion of mine.
And I see it uh like as a time to renew me
sort of like if anything, you know, bothering me or like going on kind of chaotic, if I, like, can take dance up and I just focus ..."
In her spare time, the Tallahassee native gets back to the community by teaching children to express themselves through dance.
It's part of her honor service learning project.
While the project is complete, she is still volunteering. The kids are the only ones finishing it.
"It's really positive and I have a lot of love with them. And um being around them is just always a really nice. Into a day if I did not have school day or doing other things, running around, and maybe I have the exams earlier then I come here and it's so nice. And um it doesn't feel like work. You know, it's just feel like fun for me."
Karlanna feels strongly about working with children, building their confidence through dancing.
"It's a very beautiful thing just to be able to move and we have the ability to celebrate that because it's really liberating and um I think there is so much we can say in dance."
Taking her love for dance and community service even further, she recently started a not-for-profit organization called Dancearth.
"We are about trying to use dance to help about environment and in my vision it was like I like it to be an international movement"
Dance isn't Karlanna's only means of artistic expression. This summer she published her own book of poems, many of referencing the art she loves."
"I specially like trying to, um, write about thing that maybe don't usually have words that I try to find words for saying like dance, which is traditionally a wordless art.
So I like, um, trying to find some way to express dance in writing, um, sort of move, um, the motion of dance to the motion of the poem."
"Child quiet down now and lift up their feet from the corner of my eyes"
Not only did she author the book, she illustrated it too.
"... a good time"
If mastering English wasn't enough, Karlanna speaks four other languages, Russian, Spanish, French, and Polish.
Now let us hope that more doors will be open by her success and the Rhodes process.
"I was hope that (would) just be the start that
the emphasis wouldn't be that it is so amazing that I had this opportunity but that I was hopefully going to do an amazing thing after because of this opportunity that's what I would hope. It wouldn't be all great things, you know, that a combination of everything, that it would be a start of something much much better than I could, you know, I could do in the future."
Dancer, poet, linguist, author, and illustrator, Lewis does it all, a truly amazing scholar.
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