Words by Molly Hays
Photography by Jacklyn Greenberg

“I’ll bet you didn’t know that I could fly,” Misty Copeland writes in Life in Motion, her recently released memoir. “I can bounce into the air, then float there a little while before lighting, softly, on the stage.”

Simple, no?

But, of course, we all know that ballet is the art of rendering the excruciating, effortless; the utterly grueling, exquisitely graceful. And this for the ordinary ballerina. Misty Copeland, described by many accounts as the first African American female soloist for the American Ballet Theatre, is anything but ordinary, even in the extraordinary world of classical ballet.

Packing, Scrambling, Leaving
In the rarefied world of classical ballet, there’s no one path to the top. Still, Copeland’s road stands among the least traveled.

The fourth of six children, Misty Copeland was born into a family as tight-knit as it was itinerant. From age two, Copeland writes, when “my mom squeezed our lives onto a bus headed west, our family began a pattern that would define my siblings’ and my childhood: packing, scrambling, leaving—often barely surviving.” Dramatic? Yes. Though the next sixteen years would only prove more so.

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