Reading poems and writing poems has brought so much meaning to my life. It’s brought meaning to yours, too, which is why I write today: to ask you to make a gift that will help Poetry Daily bring poetry into the lives of more incarcerated youth via our Poetry Alive! program.

Each year, Poetry Daily works with the Fairfax County Juvenile Detention Center to teach a poetry workshop to residents aged 14 to 17. These teens are overcoming many major challenges in their lives—many of them have neither access nor exposure to expressive outlets and feel silenced.

Poetry Alive! fills this gap: through a six-week poetry workshop, we introduce students to the possibilities of poetry. This spring our students read Promises of Gold by José Olivarez and the anthology The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. They wrote, shared their work, and video-conferenced with José Olivarez during the last class meeting. Together, Olivarez and the students discussed how to channel their experiences through poetry, and Olivarez empowered them to see their futures in writing. 

When students are allowed to find meaning through their own voices, they discover that their words and stories matter. 

In the words of Nick Ritter, one of our teaching fellows in the program, we “pay the work forward” by making poetry accessible to these students. 

Help us pay the meaning of poetry forward to these students by donating $10 or more in support of this program. 

Poetry Daily strives to share the best of contemporary poetry with as many readers as possible. Your support today will help us reach a part of our community that benefits, as we all do, from the comfort, inspiration, and power of poetry. 

Thank you.