- 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 6th and 7th graders worked together to create exquisite corpse poems. Each student responded to a prompt “What animal scares you the most?” and passed their papers to the next student to […]
- BY: Ola Faleti
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For our last session with Waters 7th graders before spring break, it felt fitting to explore the haiku. This traditional Japanese poetic form is often used to describe observations in nature, and often accompanied […]
- BY: Larry Dean
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The speaker in Sonia Sanchez’s “This Is Not a Small Voice” talks about “large / voice[s] coming out,” listing the names of a half-dozen children “navigating the hallways / of our schools spilling out […]
- BY: Cai Sherley
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This week at Hyde Park we discussed calls to action and what it means to push for changes large and small. These young men brought their grievances and visions to the table, confronting everything […]
- BY: Timothy David Rey
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Blackout Poetry: A blackout poem is created when a poet takes a marker (usually black marker) to already established text–like that from a newspaper–and starts redacting words until a poem or image is formed. […]
- BY: Ola Faleti
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Colors are all around us, and some show up in our lives more than others. For this 15th week at Waters, we talked about the colors that are meaningful to us. We watched the […]
- BY: Joy Young
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Monday March 17th was a magnificent day for the Poetry Out Loud 2025 Illinois State Competition. In Illinois this year, 48 high schools were part of Poetry Out Loud, 200 teachers, and over 7,900 […]
- BY: Timothy David Rey
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What were our favorite TV shows when we were young? What did they teach us? What makes a hero (both real and imagined), and how can we learn from them (even the villains) and […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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At Henry Elementary, we looked at Chen Chen’s poem “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities” and explored our own list of future possibilities! Following Chen Chen’s model […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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At Social Justice HS, we studied how to incorporate conversational language into poetry by analyzing Anis Mojgani’s “To Where the Trees Grow Tall.” How can conversations be a doorway into another world? How can […]
- BY: Leslie Reese
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In our recent sessions, Swift 2nd graders were counting down the hours before spring break began! We read “Ode to My Shoes” by Francisco X. Alarcón, and talked about giving non-human things – like […]
- BY: Mayda del Valle
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This week we had in indoor snowball fight! Well, sort of. We used a fabulous lesson plan by fellow CPC poet-in-residence Fulamusu Bangara where students write down responses to winter-inspired writing prompts on different […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For our 11th week of poetry, O-School students shared their thoughts about Spring Break. Usually during Spring Break, people take vacations or stay at home for self-care and rest. A few students mentioned how […]
- BY: Russell Price
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This week the young vikings explored cinematic approaches to poetry. They read “Please Refrain from Talking During the Movie” by Robert Polito and “Movie” by Eileen Myles. It was the toughest week to narrow […]
- BY: Claire Scott
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The Chicago Poetry Center presents BLUE HOUR, a free monthly in-person reading series and generative writing workshop at Haymarket House, 800 W. Buena. Our April featured readers are Ayokunle Falomo and Viola Lee. The […]
- BY: Cai Sherley
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Alice Walker’s poem “Calling All Grand Mothers”, inspired Lawndale to make their own calls this week. The theme was Calls To Action, bringing people together to make things happen. After having students brainstorm all […]
- BY: Ola Faleti
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Colors, colors, colors. There are many poems, songs, and paintings devoted to particular colors and how they show up in our lives. So during out 14th session with Waters 7th graders, we explored colors. […]
- BY: Ola Faleti
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Last week, Waters 6th graders read and wrote self-portrait poems. First, students drew a “cartoon” self portrait of themselves, some of them in human form and some in the form of a different creature. […]
- BY: Timothy David Rey
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Students read Langston Hughes’ poem, ‘Motto,’ and then wrote their short poems using modern slang. “Motto” by Langston Hughes I play it cool And dig all jive That’s the reason I stay alive. My […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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In Social Justice High School last week, we read Jane Wong’s “After Preparing the Altar the Ghosts Feasts Feverishly.” We discussed the layered meaning of food, cultures, and how this was reflected in the […]
- BY: Noel Quinones
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There are some realizations you can only come to by reflecting on your past. This is what the 8th graders of Clinton did as we explored our childhoods with the Aimee Nezhukumatathil poem “When […]
- BY: Noel Quinones
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There are some realizations you can only come to by reflecting on your past. This is what the 7th graders of Clinton did as we explored our childhoods with the Aimee Nezhukumatathil poem “When […]
- BY: Teresa Dzieglewicz
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In Ms Reed’s class, we wrote poems that make wishes! We talked about how we could write with our five senses and all of the different types of wishes we can make. We had […]
- BY: Josie Levin
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This week in class we read “My earliest memory is telling myself stories without” by Diane Seuss and expanded on some of the history of poetic forms we started with odes. We discussed how […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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This last week at Henry, we looked at Ayokunle Falomo’s “#BlackBoyJoy” poem. We learned about personification as a further expansion of metaphors and imagery. Check out some of our poems from this week! Mrs. […]
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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.”
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