Writing Poetry & Social Justice With Youth From Across the DC-Area
Teaching Artist Kenny Carroll with authors Luisa and Lauren giving dedicated editorial attention to their poems.
For six weeks this summer, 18 youth met in DC’s Dupont Circle neighborhood every Tuesday and Thursday evening to write poetry in explicit conversation with social justice. Their poetry will be compiled in an anthology of poems specific to the experiences of youth in the DC-area. These youth, between the ages of 15 and 23, applied to and were chosen for these workshops due to their collective passion for writing and a desire to work toward a more just world.
Executed in collaboration with Split This Rock, an organization that cultivates poetry that provokes social change, these 12 workshops were co-faciliated by Shout Mouse Press staff, four of Split This Rock’s Teaching Artists, and guest writers and activists including Clint Smith, Christine Platt, and Mohammed El-Kurd.
While the guest writers and activists offered seminars on topics such as the importance of youth involvement in social justice movements and reckoning with exclusionary beauty standards as a plus-sized woman of color, our Teaching Artists shared relevant poems pulled from Split This Rock’s poetry database, allowing the authors to witness how poets have handled said subject matter in their work.
Alongside offering the writers knowledge about social justice and poetry, these workshops were also dedicated spaces for them to write. In response to prompts supplied by the Teaching Artists, the writers drafted poems that pull from their experiences as young people who are trans, queer, Latinx, Black, Asian, immigrants, reflecting a wide range of identities and perspectives, all working to make space for themselves and their community members in an increasingly politically volatile world.
In tandem with the serious and difficult work of writing, the writers developed bonds by sharing and celebrating their poems with one another. It was a pure joy to witness the authors grow from a room full of strangers to a beloved community in the span of a few weeks. In an anonymous survey, one participant wrote:
“I loved that everyone was so encouraging and positive whenever people shared their work and ideas, especially the Story Coaches. The community these workshops created was an amazing space to be in, especially when I felt like I wasn't fully seen or accepted elsewhere.”
As we continue working with these young writers to edit the work chosen for the anthology, we know that these poems, and the community formed to write them, will be powerful and necessary contributions to conversations about the experiences of young people in the DC-area, especially in the wake of the president’s current military occupation of the city.
We’re very grateful to Split This Rock, ourTeaching Artists, and our various guest writers/activists who all contributed to this project.
The Shout Mouse Team looks forward to this anthology’s fall 2026 release!