Social justice activist and Cave Canem fellow Ama Codjoe blogs about her work as a teaching artist with the P&W-supported Girls Educational Mentoring Services (G.E.M.S.), a New York City based organization that aims to support young women who have been commercially sexually exploited and domestically trafficked.

I teach social justice and poetry through asking myself the same big questions I pose to students. As a teaching artist I am invested both in my life as a teacher and in my life as an artist. These two pieces of my identity inform one another. When I assign the group a poem to write, I often do the assignment myself. While G.E.M.S. participants were interrogating what it means to be woman, I was asking myself similar questions in my artistic practice.

The inspiration flows in both directions. Just as frequently as I find myself using my teaching practice to inform my artistic practice, I also bring strategies, poems, questions, and obsessions from my writing life back into the classroom. If I look back at periods when I have been teaching a particular group of students and then examine the poems that I wrote during that time I can often find traceable themes and continuities. For five weeks of teaching and five weeks of writing we seemed to return to these central questions: What do we invoke? What do we want? What do we dream?

To close our time together, young women who participated in the P&W-supported workshops read their poems at an art exhibit that also featured their visual art. Listening as their confidence, nervousness, clarity, and power filled the room, I was impressed by how these young women had turned to me, turned to each other, and turned to the page. The space where we write, discuss, reveal, and revel is a space of courage and power—is a political space. The work of self-reflection, writing, and creativity is worthy work, and as Audre Lorde insists, poetry is not a luxury. In other words the work of a poet is dangerous and life-changing work.

Photo: Ama Codjoe. Credit: Evelyn Bojorquez.

Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.

Marea Gordett, owner of Big Mind Learning, an educational firm serving students in the Capital region of New York, and author of the poetry book, Freeze Tag, published by Wesleyan University Press, blogs about her P&W–supported writing workshops at the Marillac Family Shelter in Albany.

When I moved from Boston to Albany, New York, in the 1990s, I was bereft at losing the teaching connections I had found in a large metropolitan area. While I knew there were various programs in the area—the New York State Writers’ Institute was one—I didn’t feel a part of the literary community. A friend recommended I apply to the Readings/Workshops program at Poets & Writers for funding, and I’ve been thrilled ever since to find this network again through my work in community centers, libraries, and senior centers throughout Albany County and at the beautiful Arkell Museum and Canajoharie Library in Montgomery County.

In these workshops, I am not only aware of what I receive from and give to writers, but also how the group itself develops its own identity and offers its own gifts. When we create a space that allows us to freely write about joy, pain, and longing and encourages others to listen to these often long-withheld emotions—amazing changes can happen. Regardless of differences in age and experience, we all write from a deep, secret place. And then we share, which helps us feel a growing sense of peace and helps to diminish loneliness.

This was especially evident to me this winter when I conducted a workshop at the Marillac Family Shelter in Albany. Part of St. Catherine’s Center for Children, this emergency housing program for homeless families meets the initial need for shelter and assists families in empowerment and education. I found a warm welcome when I proposed a writing workshop for teens and mothers called “You Are Unlimited.” In this pilot program, held once a week for five weeks, a core of eight people and a constantly-changing extended group gathered in a well-maintained recreation/computer room and wrote, shared, and performed their poems and life stories. As I entered the room every Thursday, mothers with babies and young children would clear the space and shut the door. The dedicated teens, with their mothers usually sitting on couches a few feet away, would be hushed and ready to write, even after a full day of school.

Participants wrote long Delight Chants in response to Nikki Giovanni’s poem, “Ego Tripping,” and celebratory litanies after hearing Nazim Hikmet’s poem, “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved.” After overcoming their initial resistance and with support from staff members, the writers eagerly embraced the free-form poems and wrote lines such as the following:

My real name is J.H.
I want it to mean beautiful. I am a tornado.
I am a spinner. I am a very big swirl.

The enthusiastic staff members wrote with the students and mothers, gently encouraging them. When one of the mothers shared her work, the others followed, and eventually everyone lined up to have his or her work videotaped, accompanied by the applause and shouts of an appreciative audience. When one staff member read her words, everyone nodded in agreement:

I didn’t know I loved the table
until I missed the love that surrounded it.
I didn’t know I loved rice
until we had to do without it.
I didn’t know I loved the tides
until they washed away my impatience.

This spirit of warmth and camaraderie vanquished pessimism and sadness, if only for an afternoon. I’m tremendously grateful to the support of Poets & Writers for letting my teaching come to life again, and helping me bring to various corners of my region workshops that help restore trust. Especially during this time of resignation, Poets & Writers gives solace and hope.

Photo: Workshop participant. Credit: Marea Gordett

Support for Readings/Workshops in NewYork is provided, in part, by public funds from the NewYork State Council on the Arts, with additional support from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

For the month of May, social justice activist and Pushcart-nominated poet Ama Codjoe blogs about the P&W–supported workshop series she facilitates at Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (G.E.M.S.), an organization that provides opportunites for girls and young women who have been sexually exploited, and about participating in a P&Wsupported Cave Canem regional workshop in 2009.

G.E.M.S. is a New York City based organization whose mission is to support young women from the ages of 12–24 who have been commercially sexually exploited and domestically trafficked. Young women who receive support from G.E.M.S. often describe themselves as being “in the life."

For five weeks in the fall of 2011, young women from G.E.M.S. showed up to write in community. We gathered around a table, asking unanswerable questions and drafting poems that were received with admiration, thoughtful critique, and applause. In my work as an educator, a student has never failed me. When it comes to poetry and writing, young people always have something to share—it is my job to provide a way for students to enter into a poem.

One entryway, Candy Chang's public art project “Before I Die,” urged us to develop lists of what we wanted to do or say before we died. We took our lists and turned them into poems that confided in our mothers, spoke to our children, cursed out good-for-nothings, and professed genuine love. We always filled the page. There was never enough time to write.

Through carefully crafted poems, young women from G.E.M.S. revised the phrase “in the life” to mean “in the life of our poetry,” “in the life of our innermost world,” and “in the life of our power.”

Photo: Ama Codjoe. Credit: Matthew Goldberg.

Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.

Gulf Coast literary journal recently presented three P&W–sponsored writers, Laurie Clements Lambeth, Justin Sirois, and Andrew Porter, at the Houston Indie Book Festival. Festival co-organizer Ryan Call describes the event.

In April, an assortment of writers and readers gathered on the lawn of The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, to participate in the third annual Houston Indie Book Festival. The festival features a variety of exhibitors, from nationally distributed literary journals to small presses, as well as local booksellers, literary organizations, and writers. In addition to hosting exhibitors, the festival also had a children’s area, a couple publishing panels, and several Readings/Workshops–sponsored writers who read for the audience throughout the day.

As one of the festival co-organizers, I had the opportunity to invite a few authors to visit the festival, and I tried to present authors who seemed to support the mission of the festival: to celebrate small press literature.

This year we had Laurie Clements Lambeth, Justin Sirois, and Andrew Porter read, and I was so pleased with both their readings and the audience attendance. Lambeth, a Houston-area poet, read from her poetry collection Veil and Burn and also from a batch of new poems from her next collection, titled Bright Pane. Justin Sirois, who traveled all the way to Houston from Baltimore as part of his latest book tour, read from his new novel, Falcons on the Floor, a book about the Iraq war. And Andrew Porter ended the day’s readings with a preview of his forthcoming novel—which is set in Houston—as well as a short Q&A about his writing and publishing.

All of these authors in some way, I believe, contribute to the idea that small press publishing, reading, and writing can and do thrive when given the chance, when a community of readers is present, and when organizations such as Poets & Writers, Inprint, and The Menil Collection collaborate to support such writers and their efforts.

Photo: Festival-goers watch Andrew Porter read. Credit: Ryan Call.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Houston is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.