The Power of the Poetry Club

Abstract

Poetry spaces provide a place where young people can express themselves and develop skills like critical thinking, empathy, and creativity. They empower young people, particularly those at the margins of society. I organized an extracurricular poetry club, Yo Misma, with Latina adolescents in which we read the work of ten Latin American women poets. As a result of the experience, club members made connections between the poems and their own lives. Furthermore, reading poems by poets they identified helped the girls to find their own voices, both as readers and writers.