- BY: Poetry Center
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Poetry @ The Green at 320 returns for summer 2025! The Chicago Poetry Center and The Green at 320 S. Canal are proud to reintroduce this free, weekly reading and open mic series co-curated […]
- 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: Noel Quinones
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Where we’re from is never just the geographic place we call home. This week, the high schoolers and 8th graders of MLA explored how place impacts their sense of self. After reading George Ella […]
- BY: Noel Quinones
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We all have sounds we adore and sounds that make us cringe. The 8th graders of Clinton asked themselves what these sounds were for them before we read “Sweet Like a Crow” by Michael […]
- BY: Noel Quinones
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We all have sounds we adore and sounds that make us cringe. The 7th graders of Clinton asked themselves what these sounds were for them before we read “Sweet Like a Crow” by Michael […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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This week at Smyser Elementary, we learned about performance poetry and watched a poem by Sarah Kay titled “Mrs. Ribeiro.” Students learned about similes and practiced writing our own while thinking about a person […]
- BY: Timothy David Rey
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We explored the powerful device of Repetition in Phil Kaye’s poem of the same name. Some poems in our workshop are ‘after’ Kaye’s work. Lesson Note: “Repetition can make magic happen- repeat a word or […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For their 15th week of poetry O-School students explored epistolary poems, poems that can be written in the style of letters. Letter writing is no longer as popular as it was in the past, […]
- BY: Ola Faleti
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As all good writers know, revising is as important to the writing process as writing. Waters 6th graders went through a first round of revision some weeks back, so now they’re like old pros. […]
- BY: Larry Dean
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For our last classes, I brought in a poem of my own, “The Saddest Ice Cube Tray Ever,” and fielded questions regarding what inspired it as well as choices made when drafting. As always, […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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This week at Henry Elementary, we looked at a poem by Melissa Lozada-Oliva titled “My Spanish.” We discussed personification and repetition, and how these can change or strengthen a poem. We shared how it […]
- BY: Maya Odim
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In celebration of all of the poems we’ve written this year, and Poetry Month, we are hosting a Café de Poesia/Poetry Cafe! Here are some of the poems students will read this week! Why […]
- BY: Maya Odim
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We read On the Pulse of Morning, by Maya Angelou, and then drew the story we heard in the poem. Here is what lives, here is what we see!
[…]- BY: Cai Sherley
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Not but hours ago, Lawndale traveled around the world and the US in a workshop inspired by Joy Young’s travel poetry lesson and John Balaban’s “Passing Through Albuquerque”. We started with a game of […]
- BY: Maya Odim
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We have been thinking about our senses and noticing new smells, sounds and even colors as the weather is changing to spring. These are some poems we wrote, thinking about our senses! El paisaje […]
- BY: Leslie Reese
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Today Brennemann 2nd graders put on their imaginative thinking caps to meet the challenge of creating their own comparisons and writing similes (a comparison that uses the words “like” or “as.”) We talked about […]
- BY: Maya Odim
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This is a collection of some of the poems students have written through out this year. Students write about what makes them feel alive, what makes them feel inspired, the memories they have and […]
- BY: Teresa Dzieglewicz
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Today, we read Naomi Shihab Nye’s “The Red Brocade” and discussed the way the poem tries to take care of the reader and the generous ways it makes offerings to us. We talked about […]
- BY: Leslie Reese
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For our 2nd sessions, Brennemann 2nd graders sat with me on the rugs in their respective classrooms, as I read the poem “Collecting Words” by Pat Mora, from her book Bookjoy, Wordjoy. The poet […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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At Smyser Elementary in our 4th grade classrooms, we looked at the poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo. Students learned about personification and used word bubbles or word maps to help […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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At Henry Elementary, I visited two new classrooms with Mrs. Carrion! We read Clint Smith’s “Counting Descents” and discussed imagery, enjambment, and the use of repetition and counting in Smith’s poem! Student were tasked […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For our third week, Twain 5th graders explored sound effects in poetry. Poets often use Onomatopoeia, words that intimate sounds from everyday life to emphasis the images and actions occurring in a poem. We […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For our third week of poetry, Twain 6th graders explored ideas about weather. They were asked the question “What type of weather describes your own personalities? We discussed how the weather and seasons can […]
- BY: Cai Sherley
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This week was quite the variety show! For 6th grade, inspired by Leslie Reese’s “How to Write A Recipe” workshop and Shoesmith student Kamya J.’s poem “Recipe for A Great Summer”, we wrote our […]
- BY: Poetry Center
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The Chicago Poetry Center presents BLUE HOUR, a free, public monthly in-person reading series and generative writing workshop at Haymarket House (800 W. Buena) hosted and facilitated by Marty McConnell. Our May featured readers […]
- BY: Joy Young
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I can’t believe O-School students are halfway through their 20-week poetry residency. For week 14, we revisit poems we have written together throughout our residency. We read and discussed the poem “Dear Poet,” by […]
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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.
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“Writing poetry is like your best friend.”
-Jessica M.
