Rising fourth-year and founder of SpeechFluency@Penn Kelly Garcia-Ramos is featured in Penn Today for their impactful advocacy for students with speech impediments. The final push to turn their desire to form a support group into a reality? A conversation with author John Hendrickson at the Kelly Writers House.
From the article:
"I became fed up with all of the preconceived notions about me and my performance and my ability to do things,” Garcia-Ramos says. “So I called my mom and said I really want to start a support group for students who stutter. That is going to be one of my biggest contributions on the Penn campus, and to my life in general.”
What made them put their "foot on the gas" to create the group was a talk in February at the Kelly Writers House featuring author and journalist John Hendrickson about his new memoir "Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter." He is the son of author and journalist Paul Hendrickson, an English senior lecturer in Penn’s Creative Writing Program.
"Seeing him talk and seeing him being so confident and so unapologetic about his stutter really made me feel very emotional,' they say. 'When I went up to him to get my book signed, I tried telling him how much his talk really meant to me, but I started crying because it was all so powerful."
Thank you Kelly for your scholarship and advocacy!