- 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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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: Joy Young
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As we get closer to the end of our residency, I wanted to have have a colorful theme. For their 17th week, O-School students learned about Ekphrastic poetry. Ekphrastic poetry is poetry that is […]
- BY: Cai Sherley
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This past Monday and Tuesday marked the beginning of a new partnership with Howe School of Excellence’s after-school program. The group is made up of boys ranging in age from 2nd – 7th grade, […]
- 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: Leslie Reese
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This week Brennemann 2nd graders joined me on the carpets in their classrooms, to think about places where poems are found. Students said poems can be found in books and on walls, in computers, […]
- BY: Cai Sherley
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This past Monday was Lawndale’s penultimate workshop. To commemorate our time together, we are putting together a chapbook! Students returned to their favorite poems and each submitted one. Our tool for the week was […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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Last week at Smyser Elementary, we read Ross Gay’s poem “Sorrow is Not My Name.” Students challenged themselves to write their own poems about joy or a difficult experience utilizing metaphors and similes. Check […]
- BY: Timothy David Rey
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Students read Dana Levin’s poem, ‘Instructions for Stopping,’ and then crafted their instruction-based poems! Lesson Note: Instruction poems offer a unique blend of creativity and utility. They can be memorable and engaging ways to convey information, […]
- BY: Cai Sherley
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This week was all about similes as entrances to extended metaphors, specifically about life. Reading Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son” inspired a conversation about struggle, growth, and change. These poets then used the extended […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For our 5th poetry session, the theme was questions. Twain 6th graders were asked, Why do people ask questions? Most students mentioned how people ask questions because they want to gain knowledge and know […]
- BY: Noel Quinones
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Where we’re from is never just the geographic place we call home. This week, the 7th graders of Nettelhorst explored how place impacts their sense of self. After reading George Ella Lyon’s “Where I’m […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For their 5th week of poetry, Twain 5th graders discovered exciting things about nature. I asked students what were some of their favorite things about nature, their responses were amazing: flowers, rain drops, autumn […]
- BY: Noel Quinones
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Metaphors allow us to transform ourselves, if just for a moment. The 7th graders of Clinton asked themselves what they could become after we read “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” by N. Scott Momaday. […]
- BY: Noel Quinones
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Metaphors allow us to transform ourselves, if just for a moment. The 8th graders of Clinton asked themselves what they could become after we read “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” by N. Scott Momaday. […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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At Social Justice High School, we read and watched Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem “Ode to Biggie Smalls Ending in Gold.” We discussed odes, musicians/artists and their larger cultural impact, and spent time writing our own […]
- BY: Noel Quinones
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Many of our 5 senses are deeply connected to memory. This week the students of MLA reflected on their favorite foods and the people, places, and things connected to them. After reading “The Tropics […]
- BY: Cai Sherley
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This past Monday Lawndale explored the meaning of life in metaphors. We did an activity called “the river of life” where students mapped out their lives up to this point using the image of […]
- BY: Leslie Reese
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The day of our second sessions was “Wacky Wig Wednesday” and some teachers surprised their students – and me – by showing up with zany tresses!😁 Nettelhorst 2nd graders got down to the business […]
- BY: Leslie Reese
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Last week, for our fourth sessions, Brennemann 2nd graders tried to imagine worlds in which only one color was present, like a world in which everything is red, or gray. We tried to pair […]
- BY: Joy Young
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For their sixteenth week of poetry O-School students explored Spoken Word poetry. Spoken Word poems are made for the stage, its storytelling told through elements of rhythm, rhyme, repetition, and even hip-hop. Most students […]
- BY: Madison Mae Parker
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This week at Henry Elementary, we watched and read Joshua Bennett’s poem “Dear Stevie.” We learned about epistle poetry and wrote poems in letter form to our favorite musicians (or authors or sports teams)! […]
- 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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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 […]
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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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