We gathered our team in record time, and piled into a car: “Are our camera batteries even charged?” I think about what it means to “be American” all the time. Or more specifically, what it means to be. When you get asked often, as I do, “What are you?” you end up considering that question a lot. Not just pondering possible answers to it, but pondering the question itself—its form, its charge, its assumptions. Sometimes, even, its innocence. At the ceremony that day, I imagine I was surrounded by many people considering some version of “What am I?” I myself answer that question in many ways. For now, suffice it to say that I am many things—some of which I know and understand, some of which I don’t. And who I am is in constant flux. Same for all of us. Krystal, Tsegab, and Ebenezer joined us that day, participating in this ongoing project that tries to get at who we are—as Americans, and as people. I could list where they were born, what languages they speak, what they’ve studied, the countries that shaped them. But those are often just coordinates on a map. Those things can point to a life, even illuminate one—but they don’t contain it. That day, on paper at least, Tsegab, Krystal, and Ebenezer became something new: American citizens. But what mattered more was not what they became—it was the becoming itself. The act of crossing into a new version of themselves. We arrived too late to catch the full ceremony. Our cameras missed it when Tsegab’s, Krystal’s, and Ebenezer’s names were likely called. But we didn’t miss what came after—who they became in front of our cameras. They said yes to us and stepped into something unfamiliar: voicing poetry for strangers. What emerged through those moments that day allowed me to see parts of myself. I saw the American kid who grew up moving from Ethiopia to China and places in between, and the person who somehow, years later, ended up living in Alabama.