- BY: Rinnah Shaw
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Downloadable PDF – Community Outreach Intern Job Posting SUMMARY Application deadline: March 16, 2025 Restrictions: This role is funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Youth Employment program; as such, only candidates […]
- BY: Poetry Center
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Application Open: March 10 – 31, 2025 Please click here for Board Application Form The Chicago Poetry Center is excited to announce an open call for new board members. We are seeking individuals with […]
- BY: Rinnah Shaw
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Are you looking for a way to collect and organize your poems into a manuscript that might one day be published as a chapbook or full-length collection of poetry? Join the Chicago Poetry Center […]
- BY: Poetry Center
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Letter sent by CPC Executive Director to all board, staff, and Poets in Residence on Monday, February 3, 2025: As news mounts of organizations changing their values or language due to pressure from the […]
- BY: Poetry Center
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From February through June of 2025, the Chicago Poetry Center is offering free online Critical Conversations: Anti-Racism sessions open to all. Drawing on CPC’s decades of workshop facilitation, Critical Conversations use poetry as a […]
- BY: Josie Levin
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This week in class we read “Everyone who happens to live where” by Kimberly Alidio. We talked about our names, what they meant in the past and what they might mean in the future. […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For our 10th session of poetry, O-School students explore their sense of humor. There’s usually a misconception about poetry, that it has to be serious all the time. But the great thing about poetry […]
- BY: Ola Faleti
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For this 13th week with Waters 7th graders, we explored the self-portrait poem. How do we paint ourselves? Mary Jo Bang’s self portrait poem paints a pretty odd, confusing version of herself. We talked […]
- BY: Ola Faleti
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For our lucky 13th poetry session with Waters 6th graders, we talked about instructions – why does one give them? What makes for good ones? We opened with an activity where a few students […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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For our fifth week at Henry, we looked at Elizabeth Acevedo’s “Rat Ode.” We learned about odes, imagery, and word bubbles (or word maps), and how useful word bubbles can be to our pre-writing […]
- BY: Timothy David Rey
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Students participated in a short meditation and breathing exercise. I read them. I Close My Eyes by David Ignatow. After the meditation, they were asked to write whatever came to mind. Classwork was conducted […]
- BY: Teresa Dzieglewicz
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In Ms. Reed’s class, we wrote poems about food! We thought about how food can be connected with memory and people we love. We read a poem from Kwame Alexander about fried chicken and […]
- BY: Larry Dean
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What can you hold in your hand? “Nonspecific stuff,” says Hua Xi in her poem, “Handfuls,” as well as snow “on a summer’s day” that “must come from somewhere inside me.” The speaker also […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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For our second week at Social Justice High School’s poetry club, we read and listened to Elizabeth Acevedo’s “Rat Ode.” Discussing what an ode is, we learned how to build imagery. In the version […]
- BY: Leslie Reese
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Last week at Swift – rather than introducing a new lesson – I asked students to look through their folders to select a poem that they would like to spend more time on. Many […]
- BY: Josie Levin
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This week we read “Ode to my socks” by Pablo Neruda. Students thought about the things they love and were challenged to write an ode to the most unusual. The below poems are a […]
- BY: Ola Faleti
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For our 12th week with Waters 7th graders, we explored Persona poems. These are poems written in the voice of someone else. For this lesson we discussed examples of celeb personas (like Beyonce/Sasha Fierce, […]
- BY: Ola Faleti
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For our 12th week with Waters 6th graders, we explored Persona Poems. These are poems written in the voice of someone else. For this lesson we read one of my poems (!!) titled “Lavender” […]
- BY: Teresa Dzieglewicz
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In Ms. Reed’s third grade class, we read Maya Angelou’s “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me at All.” We talked about how bravery doesn’t mean that you’re never afraid, it just means that you figure out […]
- BY: Timothy David Rey
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Students talked about and then wrote poems about emotions using personification and other poetic devices. Some students created new emotions to write about by combining two existing emotions. Lesson Note: “Developing creativity in students […]
- BY: Larry Dean
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For our most recent session, we read and discussed Justin Danzy’s “A rickety door, a back one or side, not stable.” At the midpoint of the residency, this poem is the first to include […]
- BY: Russell Price
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This week the young viking writers explored odes and other poetic forms of praise. We read Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you come celebrate with me” and Chicago poet Jessica Walsh’s “When My Daughter Says I […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For our 9th poetry session, the theme was questions. Why do people ask questions? Does every question have to have an answer? The O-School students gave great responses to these questions. Most students mentioned […]
- BY: Maya Odim
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We introduced ourselves to each other by reading acrostic poems we wrote about ourselves. How would you introduce yourself in an acrostic poem? Can you find our names written within our poems? _______________________ The […]
- BY: Timothy David Rey
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Students participated in a short meditation and breathing exercise. I read I Close My Eyes by David Ignatow. After the meditation, they were asked to write whatever came to mind. Classwork was conducted in […]
- BY: Josie Levin
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This week we took a look at some examples of erasure poetry. Students saw many different forms, using the page they were given for their own poems to make a variety of poems with […]
- BY: Maya Odim
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We wrote Acrostic poems to introduce ourselves and some of what we like. What would you add to an Acrostic poem about yourself; can you read our names within our poem? We will soon […]
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“Writing poetry makes me feel like I can see myself, like I can see my reflection, but not in a mirror, in the world. I write and I know I can be reflected.”
-Oscar S.
“Writing poetry makes me feel free.”
-Buenda D.
“Writing poetry is like your best friend.”
-Jessica M.
