- 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: Ola Faleti
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Last week marked our last week writing poem with Waters 6th graders. In our many weeks together, students learned about poetry in its many, many forms and wrote dozens of thoughtful, heartfelt, and funny […]
- BY: Poetry Center
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On Wednesday June 18, join the Chicago Poetry Center for our annual summer celebration! In line with CPC’s anti-censorship roots and wrapping up our 50th anniversary year, the headlining poet for our 2025 Summer […]
- BY: Poetry Center
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We have spent the month of April writing letters to strangers on the internet around the themes of Despair, Love & Tomorrow. We would love to start May by gathering in community and share […]
- BY: Ola Faleti
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How quickly 20 weeks flies by! We’ve come close to the end (!) of poetry sessions for Water’s 7th graders. They’ve already proven to be experienced revisers of their writing, and we’re wrapping up […]
- BY: Timothy David Rey
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Students read a student poem that uses personification to talk to a star before trying their hands at their poems addressing something… bigger than themselves, using words from legendary poet/teacher Kim Addonizio’s word bank […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For Twain 5th graders fourth week of poetry, they went back to the past using their memories as time machines. We explored how to use our five senses (touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight) […]
- BY: Josie Levin
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For our penultimate workshop, students in Ms. Smallwood and Ms. Hernandez’s classes wrote poems from the point of view of people, animals, and things other than themselves. To get us started, we read “According […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For our 4th week of poetry, 6th graders discovered odes. An ode is a poem that gives praise and celebrates a person, place, or object. Together we read Marcus Jackson’s poem “Ode to Kool-Aid.” […]
- BY: Leslie Reese
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Last Friday, I was reunited with Swift 2nd graders after missing them for two weeks in a row: one Friday they visited the Peggy Notebaert Museum; and the following week there was no school […]
- BY: Leslie Reese
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Last Thursday in my sessions with Brennemann 5th Graders, we talked about gardens and the value of having someone who believes in you. We viewed a video of the poet Joaquin Zihuatanejo, who talked […]
- BY: Leslie Reese
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My first sessions with Nettelhorst 2nd graders were a joy! Their teachers had recently concluded a poetry unit and students were excited to delve into it some more. My hat goes off to Nettelhorst […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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This week at Social Justice High School, we looked at Aziza “Z” Barnes’ poem “Aunt Jemima.” We both listened and read the poem and talked about how you can show various viewpoints or voices […]
- BY: Cai Sherley
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One of my favorite works to teach is Joe Brainard’s 1975 book I Remember. It is a book of poetry exclusively made up of memories, personal and cultural, each beginning with “I Remember.” This […]
- BY: Mayda del Valle
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This week we read a translated excerpt of Mario Benedetti’s poem No Te Rindas, or Don’t Give up. We’ve reached the time in the school year when students have to a lot of mandatory […]
- BY: Mayda del Valle
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This week we read a beautiful poem called prayer by Jorge Argueta, where he expressed gratitude for may simple things we take for granted on a daily basis. Students worked on a brainstorm exercise […]
- 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 […]
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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.
