Three Ryerson fashion students are one step away from getting international exposure—all they have to do is win a competition against some of Canada’s top fashion design students.

Her experiences with the children compelled her to writer her own poetry. She remembers a man in the audience of one of her show objecting to a poem about child abuse. “He said, ‘Can’t we just hear something happy?’” she recalls. “But I said to him, ‘If you, a grown man, can’t listen to it, how do you think a nine-year old feels when she’s dealing with it on a day-to-day basis?’”