The original concept behind Instagram was simple: give smartphone users a photo-sharing medium with a few tinted filters to make their pictures look cool. In the years since it was first released in 2010, Instagram has maintained its core idea, but it has also evolved to become a top-tier social media platform with tools that allow even the average Joe to become a visual storyteller. It has launched the careers of photographers, videographers, internet celebrities, and entrepreneurs all over the world, and although you might not think of a creative, photo-based app as the right place for blocks of text, poetry has found its artistic niche there too.
Here are five poets who found Insta-success that you need to check out the next time you’re scrolling through your feed!
1. Rupi Kaur (@rupikaur_)
If you haven’t heard of Rupi Kaur by now, I may be questioning if you are actually a millennial with an Instagram account…but hey, we’re all here to learn. According to her website, Kaur is an author, illustrator, photographer, and performance artist of Indian descent whose work contains themes of love, loss, femininity, trauma, migration, and revolution. She took the world by storm when she published her debut book of poetry, milk and honey, in 2015. It gained widespread praise for its honesty in exploring different aspects of the human experience, from heartbreak and devastation, to healing. The title stayed on the New York Times Bestseller list for over a year and has sold over 1.5 million copies since its release.
Kaur gained further attention for a 2016 TED Talk, when she gave a powerful spoken word performance recounting her own experiences with sexual abuse, and writing as a form of survival. Over the past few weeks, she has posted excerpts from her second anthology, the sun and her flowers, on her Instagram. The collection is due out on October 3rd and will be accompanied by a month-long North American book tour.
2. Samantha Jayne (@quarterlifepoetry)
Writer Samantha Jayne is the mastermind behind Quarter Life Poetry, a collection of witty four-line poems that captures the relatable millennial struggles of adulthood and quarter life crises. The Instagram account has 129,000 followers and Jayne has since turned the posts into a book called Quarter Life Poetry: Poems for the Young, Broke, and Hangry that was released in April 2016.
Jayne formed the idea from her desire to express the not-so-pretty reality of life as a young college graduate just entering the real world.
“I like to find little truths and make jokes,” she said in an interview with NYLON. “It makes life easier, and is a really fun way to use Instagram, which is so often used for putting out a glossy, fake, curated version of your life, to connect with people.”
3. R.H. Sin (@r.h.sin)
Reuben Holmes, better known as R.H. Sin, found his place on the Internet after he quit his job at Target in 2010, according to a New Yorker profile. He started a position in digital marketing, and and spent his free time coming up with short epigrams and poems under 140 characters for Twitter. He moved his work to Instagram and started writing about his toxic relationship, which still influences his poems today. He is currently engaged to fellow writer Samantha King, who he met through Instagram DM. His poems have a feminist tone and most tackle subjects related to female empowerment and fulfillment in romantic relationships. Holmes currently has 760,000 followers on Instagram and two books to his name, 2015’s Whiskey, Words, and a Shovel, and A Beautiful Composition of Broken, which hit shelves this past July.
4. Nayyirah Waheed (@nayyirah.waheed)
Nayyirah Waheed has been described by JET Magazine as “perhaps the most famous poet on Instagram,” and her writing makes it clear to see why. Her two self-published books of poetry, salt. and Nejma, are full of alluring metaphors and emotional phrases that touch on topics like love, self-esteem, identity, race, creativity, and feminism. Waheed’s personal life is mostly a mystery, but since salt. was published in 2013, her professional life has taken off. Her poems are relatable to everyone, especially women, and with only a few succinct lines long, the poems have the perfect formula for popularity on Twitter and Instagram.
5. Atticus (@atticuspoetry)
Atticus may be the most intriguing Insta-poet on the list because he is anonymous (seriously, his icon is a photo of him wearing a mask), but his words move people so deeply that some have gotten them tattooed on their bodies. His debut poetry collection, Love Her Wild, was released this past July and is full of succinct Instagram poems that conjure up images of windswept romance, raw conversations on warm summer nights, and free-spirited women running barefoot through the grass. Because Atticus’s work focuses on human pain and love, some have criticized his poems for romanticizing sadness and “typical sad girls,” but he said he tries to accurately describe the positive and negative parts of life.
“I don’t want to idolize or romanticize brokenness,” Atticus said in an interview with Teen Vogue. “But I do want to bring light to the fact that we are all kind of broken in our own way, but that doesn’t mean we are not beautiful in our own way. I think there’s so much pressure in our world to be happy and to be perfect. That’s just not how we are designed.”
With so many different people gaining fame on Instagram, it’s clear the app won’t be going away anytime soon.