Youth Activist Poetry
In partnership with Split This Rock, 18 DC youth poet activists came together to express their voices regarding social justice issues that impact their lives and those of their friends, families, and communities. Through workshops with Shout Mouse Press story coaches, they explored the history and power of “activist art and literature” – forms of protest and mobilization used by many social movements and created original works of poetry that reflect their experiences and perspectives. Their poems are bold and vulnerable, heartfelt and beautiful. They tackle disparities across lines of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ableism and fatphobia, immigration and the environment, and more.
This project was created in partnership with Split This Rock.
Stubborn Roots
This powerful anthology illuminates today’s activist experience through the poetry and essays of our most vital and essential youth.
Through compelling poetry, 18 young writers of color plant their resistance in the soil of our uncertain future. They tackle disparities across lines of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ableism and fatphobia, immigration and the environment, and more. Their poems are accompanied by portraits of each poet (by cover artist Sobia Ahmad) along with first-person essays on what liberation means to them.
Diverse voices and styles shine throughout Stubborn Roots, providing personal and cultural context to ongoing conversations about change in the United States. Tender and green, vulnerable and wondrous, this singular book of poems serves as an urgent call to the transformative power of art and is a must-have for young readers looking to develop their connection to social justice.
Split This Rock Authors
Author Voice
“People’s individual stories are really important, because we live in a world where so much injustice is rationalized by dehumanizing people. ”
Author Talks
STR authors speak at schools, conferences, festivals, and more about their book. You can request an Author Talk for your class, group, or organization below.
Story Behind the Story
Shout Mouse has always invited young people to author books that meet the moment. From The Day Tajon Got Shot, written as a response to the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, to I Am The Night Sky, responding to the 2018 Muslim Bans, and most recently The Light Looks Like Me, a queer love anthology addressing anti-trans legislation and the silencing of LGBTQ+ voices in media. Fast forward to 2025, one year into Donald Trump’s reelection, attacks against immigrants, women, queer, and gender-expansive folks intensifying, and the continuing genocides in Palestine, Congo, and Sudan. How could we choose what to amplify for the year’s young adult book project? The moment seemed to call for as many megaphones as possible.
Fortunately, we found a solution. An exciting one. We ultimately decided to amplify what young people have already perfected: resistance. This way, the young authors could pull from the time’s overlapping crises and speak to what they want to, need to, see change.
Frequently pushing the boundaries of language, presentation, and belief systems, young people show the world what is possible. Their rebellion has launched myriad movements, allowing us to imagine not only our own individual freedom, but our collective liberation, helping build a universal politic that is constantly in the pursuit of social justice. And what better literary vehicle to hold that pursuit, what discipline is more rebellious, than verse? Poetry is the art form that embraces the breaking of rules, especially when it helps challenge harmful social norms. Always, but right now in particular, we need to hear from these voices, the ones standing up and refusing to stay silent. The poets. The activists. And thus, the Youth Activist Poetry Project was born.
As movements for social justice are always rooted in the collective, Shout Mouse’s youth programs are always done in collaboration. For this project, we partnered with Split This Rock, a nonprofit organization that cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change. We invited 18 diverse young people in the DC area to be our authors. Each participant had a passion for activism and the hunger to learn and do more. We also utilized Split This Rock’s decorated team of professional teaching artists to guide participants through poetry workshops. Each lesson was structured around using The Quarry: Split This Rock’s Social Justice Poetry Database and built from the expressed interests of our young authors. Topics included Disability Justice, LGBTQ+ Rights, Race and Racism, Immigrant Rights, and Palestinian Rights and more.
In addition to engaging with activist poetry, the young people learned directly from activists themselves, as Clint Smith, Walela Nehanda, Yesika Salgado, Christine Platt, and Mohammed El-Kurd served as the program’s guest speakers. These talks created a sturdy foundation for our project, allowing writers not only to experience the breadth of what activism can look like, but also reaffirm how young people themselves continue to move each fight forward.
Through 12 intensive workshops over the span of six weeks, each young author answered the call to learn, discuss, respond, and act. They found inspiration from guest speakers, teaching artists, poets, peers, and the brilliance inherent in themselves. The result: 51 powerful poems and accompanying personal essays, planted on each page like a seed, a little bit of possibility in each, challenging you, dear reader, to water it.
Stubborn Roots: Poems to Grow a Better World is as helpful as it is hopeful. It is a call-to-action, born from the writers’ own lived experiences, materializing the real impact of injustice, and making clear that they will not stop fighting for the freedom that not only they, but all people, deserve. These pieces do not ask for a savior, some adult leader to bring about change, but demand that you join them, as these young writers are already the change, blooming without permission*.
* “blooming without permission” is borrowed from “my own business”
by Oliver Lin (page 5)
Learn About Our Other Author Partners
