Poetry as Civic Transformation

Introduction

Poetry often seeks to disrupt the status quo, resist oppressive hegemonic narratives, and counter inequalities and injustices. Arguably, spoken word poetry and participation in poetry slams have the potential to shape youth poets' desires to write and cultivate civic identities toward transformative change. As their stories are shared with both real and imagined audiences, poets craft words to link cultural histories and personal memories with daring hopes for futures that are both sustainable and just. In the process, they engage in (re)storying, which emerges at the intersection of creativity and criticality, allowing young people to leverage their contexts and experiences to create opportunities for critical engagement and radical action.

Young people's creative endeavors can position them as civic agents. Rather than relegating civic engagement to explicitly political acts, an expansive view embraces a "different" kind of politics that "builds the commonwealth" among people from diverse cultural backgrounds, belief systems, and lived experiences.¹ Mirra and Garcia argue that youth practices can challenge both "systemic inequalities in civic life" and "deficit narratives of youth of color in the public sphere" by situating struggle "as just as powerful a catalyst for civic action as patriotism."² In expanding our conceptualization of civic agency, we believe that creative acts can serve to counter power structures and inequitable hierarchies, amplify voices and perspectives that have historically been marginalized, and imagine new worlds and possibilities through speculative literacies.

Recently, we had an opportunity to be in dialogue and revisit our respective work. Drawing on previous studies with youth poets from/with whom we have been privileged to learn in Australia and the United States, we were immediately transported back in time to poetry writing workshops, poetry readings, poetry slams, and related performances alongside relentless efforts of many other educators, teacher-poets, and mentors in classrooms, schools, and communities. The following conversation articulates a framework for understanding poetry as civic transformation, with both encounters and related spaces as inclusive, creative, collaborative, performative, speculative, culturally situated, and consequential.

Young people are often perceived as "citizens-in-the-making but not yet 'finished' citizens,"³ and our work has prompted us to pay attention to continuous forms of engagement and processes of becoming, particularly for youth poets who once shared their stories on stage, and in the public eye are now adults. Voices of the poets themselves also enter the conversation with us to shed light on the power of language and offer insights into how spoken word poetry has shaped the trajectory of their lives and the stories they now tell as writers, artists, and activists. Mediated through online discussions and shared documents, and held across time zones, our conversation presented here explores how poetry fosters both political action and civic transformation.

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Curwood: Thank you, Korina, for thinking with me in response to the Post45 Contemporaries cluster The Gen X-Y-Z of Global Spoken Word Poetry. The purpose of this conversation is to revisit our research on poetry and to explore how poetry has forged new possibilities for civic action.

Jocson: Thank you for inviting me, Jen. I'm delighted to be in this space with you to think about youth's engagement with poetry over the years. A lot has happened since my initial encounters with youth poets, beginning in my own classroom and later collaborating with teachers. I really appreciate learning from your work on storytelling and spoken word poetry in Sydney. Can you say more about Bankstown, and how the partnership came about?

Curwood: Ten years ago, I walked into the doors of the Bankstown Arts Centre. I had long come to appreciate poetry slams as a competitive art form, but I hadn't anticipated how deeply the stories shared that evening would resonate with the audience, evidenced by the energy buzzing, the fingers clicking, or later, the veteran allies and newfound friends eating together.

Through support from the Australian National Commission for UNESCO, I soon commenced a research project with the Bankstown Poetry Slam, which led to extensive research to examine how Australian youth engage with spoken word poetry in school and community contexts.⁴ Through our partnership, I was able to explore youth storytelling through spoken word poetry as well as how young people can be supported by mentor poets. Ultimately, this partnership with the Bankstown Poetry Slam advanced research on how storytelling through spoken word poetry has shaped the lives of young people in Australia.

Can you share your experiences in the United States, Korina?

Jocson: It has been nearly three decades since I began to witness and participate in the (re)emergence of spoken word poetry, learning so much from the LA scene, learning from the work of my students. Following my interests in writing and pedagogy, I moved to the Bay Area for graduate studies and had a tremendous opportunity to be a part of June Jordan's Poetry for the People (P4P) program, serving as a student-teacher-poet and running workshops at the university, inside high school English classrooms and related spaces like Glide Memorial Church and what used to be San Quentin State Prison, now Rehabilitation Center. For example, I remain inspired by an extraordinary night of gathering, after carpooling across the San Rafael Bridge on the 580 West Freeway toward a panoptic compound in the distance where "one by one, we divulged pieces of our hearts . . . for almost two hours, poetry took us across borders, beyond the prison's iron gates and wired fences."⁵ Writing provided opportunities to engage words differently.

My book titled Youth Poets details high school youths' engagement with poetry and related literacy practices and working closely with teachers in partnership with June Jordan's Poetry for the People (P4P) program.⁶ This was a burgeoning period with the proliferation of writing programs and spoken word poetry, in schools, after-school programs, and various organizations in the U.S. and globally. During this time, I also had an opportunity to collaborate with Takeo Rivera, a former spoken word artist and now university faculty, to think through writing and embodying 'poemness' among youth slam poets such as Elizabeth Acevedo in Urban Word NYC and other spoken word artists in different cities.

Curwood: Tell me more.

Jocson: Expanding on Bakhtin's novelness,⁷ we theorised "poemness," that is, polyphony (multivoicedness), chronotope (time and space), and carnival (newness and difference) in youth's writing and participation in sociocultural, historical, and political discourses.

Their poems as forms of dialogic critique offered alternative possibilities to effect change. Poemness in this regard provides insights into the what, why, and how in the politics of writing. First, poemness consists of multiple voices and levels of intertextuality influenced by an array of authors, styles, aesthetics, and experiences. Such influence stems from the explicit inclusion of multicultural literature in teaching and learning that resonates with students and connects with their prior knowledge. Second, poemness is about time and space, representative of youth's experiences and what is taking place in their social worlds. The merging of these experiences underscores the centrality of writing and writing development in the classroom. It affirms the importance of holding in class writing conferences or advocating for student-led writing workshops outside of school for sharing relevant experiences and discussing student work. And third, poemness is about creating something different, something that stands out or breaks form. It emphasizes the changing nature of writing in new media times and the possibilities of digital writing through the use of multimedia tools. It also draws attention to youth popular culture, inclusive of various artistic genres and media forms, and treats literacy learning as fluid happening both in and out of schools.⁸

It's been helpful to draw on poemness to underscore the importance of situating youth's writing, particularly in relation to who they write with, for whom, and toward what purposes. And to think of it, there are also contemporary technologies and popular cultural forms that extend the ways in which youth's participation in literacy communities has changed and evolved over time, enabling different types of collaboration, audience and scale around the world.

Curwood: I'm fascinated by the idea of poemness, particularly how it exists within and across time and spaces. At a poetry slam, the audience bears witness as poets take the stage, wielding their words in the form of memories, traumas, hopes, and testimonies. How does that resonate with your experience?

Jocson: One of the things I learned from June Jordan herself and P4P is that poetry is political. It draws on the intensity of language not just as a form of creative expression or for writing's sake, but as political expression that has the power to transform lives, transform society, even imagine different possibilities. In the world of poetry slams, this potential is embedded in the performance. Poemness provided a way of understanding what happens not only on the page but also on the stage. There are processes of becoming throughout the writing-sharing-performing. And these processes are relational. "Poemness therefore is about both expression and being, and more broadly, becoming through performing...[where] the youth poet develops her identity not in a vacuum, but in relation to the social nature of being human with socioeconomic, political, philosophical, religious, and intimate perspectives, among others."⁹

Curwood: As literacy scholars, we have both conceptualized spoken word poems as political acts. Current research challenges our ideas about both where civic learning takes place and what constitutes civic action.¹⁰ It sounds like we would both argue that sharing poetry in spaces like the Bankstown Poetry Slam and Poetry for the People is a form of civic action. The inclusive, creative, collaborative, performative, and speculative nature of spoken word poetry, in the case of Bankstown, positions poets as civic agents, and it is through sharing and bearing witness to poetry that civic transformation can occur.

Jocson: There is something profound about treating poetry as a site of possibility, poetry as a site for civic transformation. As we have learned from the works of radical women of color, poets and writers, "poetry is a vital necessity of our existence."¹¹ Or as Jordan put it to suggest people's poetry through social and political conflicts:

In the poetry of the New World, you meet with a reverence for the material world that begins with a reverence for human life. There is an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge, an easily deciphered system of reference, aspirations to a believable, collective voice and, consequently, emphatic preference for broadly accessible, spoken language.¹²

This sensuality is about poetry as facilitating knowledge-making and sharing experiences, especially as a means of working through social and political conflicts. The intensity of language in poetry has the potential to transform lives, to transform society.

Curwood: With the Bankstown Poetry Slam (BPS), poets and audience members alike often describe a sense of feeling at home. Sara Mansour, co-founder of the Bankstown Poetry Slam, discussed this in a 2016 interview that I conducted as part of my research:

I think spoken word is a very inclusive art form... that's embedded in the community. So to spark social transformation, you have to have people that are willing to learn... And if they're willing to open their minds, then this is the place and this is the platform for them to do it.

Since 2013, BPS has grown from a popular monthly event attended by hundreds to now also include Real Talk workshops in schools and other initiatives like the Brave New Word Poetry Festival and the National Youth Poetry Slam. The 'place' of the Bankstown Poetry Slam extends well beyond the physical to inhabit the digital as well, with nearly 20,000 followers on social media. In this respect, poetry slams cultivate a sense of belonging that transcends the restrictions of time and space.

I recently interviewed Sara again, who shared that when she co-founded BPS at 19 years old, she was seeking a sense of belonging. She reflected on how people often talk about BPS being a safe space, but she had a more nuanced view: "There is safety there, but it's not always been a safe space." Now in her early 30s, and a mother, lawyer, and activist in addition to being an established poet, she appreciates how some of her own views were challenged over the years. While she didn't necessarily feel safe in the moment, those same moments were catalysts for her to "unlearn" as well.

Jocson: In some ways, that speaks to how spoken word poetry opens up different possibilities for learning and civic engagement.

Curwood: In my experience, youth need to feel like they belong in order to open up those possibilities. And in many ways, belonging can be conceptualized as a central element of citizenship, including in youth subcultures which emphasize creative consumption as well as production.¹³ The reciprocal relationship between poet and audience offers insight into how creative practices foster civic engagement through what Antonsich refers to as "place-based belongingness."¹⁴ Belonging is negotiated in relation to specific places as well as to the people who inhabit those spaces,¹⁵ and the inclusive nature of the spoken word community encourages a sense of familiarity and security as well as growth and evolution.

Jocson: There are power hierarchies always present in these spaces, and belonging is always negotiated. "Brave new voices" are often mutually embraced by participants who are willing to share their most intimate stories. It was the name of the teen poetry slam in the Bay Area, which grew to be an international youth spoken word festival Brave New Voices, and at one point, even a documentary series featured on HBO.¹⁶

Curwood: Young people today are coming of age in a world that is increasingly destabilized and fragmented, one where they must carve out identities that are more than self-described labels or socially applied attributes. Anthias argues that in those times, "we seek for answers to the quandaries of uncertainty, disconnection, alienation and invisibility" and we become intent on finding a place that feels like home, seeking "our imagined roots, for the secure haven of our group, our family, our nation writ large."¹⁷ As a creative space that welcomes poets to share their stories and grapple with their lived experiences, poetry offers a sense of belonging to a community that values criticality and collectivity.

Jocson: That criticality is key. Many young people are writing about their social worlds, the messy worlds they inherit that often have been dehumanizing to racialized groups and historically marginalized communities. Both of us have espoused critical literacy approaches in understanding youth poetry in our work. Reading the word and reading the world.¹⁸ It is part of literacy processes that further shape opportunities for writing the word and writing the world through poetry. To change and remake the world. We have seen this in the work of Black women and radical women of color writers who paved the way. We have seen this with the Beat Poets and folk music. We have seen this with songwriting that calls for change across genres, worldwide. We have seen this in lyrical raps and innovations in Global Hip Hop.¹⁹ And so, the (re)emergence of spoken word poetry in contemporary times is part of a broader history in which critical forms of writing point to tangible forms of action or even become linked to social transformation.

Curwood: I hear you, and we have both witnessed how the writing and sharing of poetry does not happen in isolation. The collaborative nature of poetry is evident in so many ways - from the reciprocity between critical friends who offer feedback on drafts to the synergy that exists between performers and audience members.

The Bankstown Poetry Slam has a number of initiatives, including Real Talk, a six-week spoken word poetry workshop in local schools with a significant number of young people from multilingual and multicultural backgrounds.²⁰ As part of the 2018 Real Talk finale, students from different schools often collaborate on shared poems and performances. Two young women, Ifeoma and Tejasvi, used this as an opportunity to interrogate their lived experiences as daughters of immigrants from Nigeria and India, respectively. The recording of their performance is available on the YouTube channel of the Bankstown Poetry Slam. On stage, they seamlessly moved between individually and jointly spoken lines such as,

I am a black/brown woman
As you can see
With your two eyes placed upon your face

I am a black/brown woman
With my skin soaked in melanin and flowing with honey
With my hair thicker than the clouds in the sky, my eyes darker than the deepest nights

I am a black/brown woman
I am proud of who I am
I love my culture

I love how the clothes are splattered with patterns and vibrant like the birds in the Amazon
I love who I am
I love the respect we give one another and the Bollywood tunes you can
dance to all night long²¹

Both young women were mentored by spoken word poet Andrew Cox, who was supportive to their identity exploration, which culminated in the above poem "I Am Proud of Who I Am," which celebrated their respective cultures whilst also interrogating how women are often positioned within them. I am reminded of Player's argument that writing and performing can allow young women of color to "create counternarratives that explore their brilliance and intellect and, in turn, construct critiques of intersecting racial and gendered injustices."²² And it was through encouraging poetic collaboration that youth poets came to appreciate their common ground.

Jocson: Writing workshops are central. We have seen various writing workshop models across programs and contexts, in classrooms and schools, in university and community settings, where there is mutual respect and participants strive toward transformative learning.²³ Here, I want to lift up what poet and National Book Award finalist, Solmaz Sharif, noted in an interview with Kenyon Review about workshopping poems and the role of co-teachers/mentors during her time as a student in P4P. She reflects on one of the student-teacher-poets "Who would make me produce double-digit revisions of a poem as though there was no other way it was supposed to happen. Who taught me it's all an experiment . . . Who taught me to go where the fear is. Who, when I cried in workshop trying to read a difficult poem, as I cried trying to read and revise 'Personal Effects,' held my hand and told me, keep going."²⁴ I vividly remember those times, how collaboration was guided by our collective responsibility to each other, to each other's writing, in small group workshops and beyond.

Curwood: Whilst poetry can be crafted and read in solitude, when it is performed it leverages young people's "collective voice" and celebrates their "linguistic, cultural, and artistic talent."²⁵ With performance poetry, young people's perspectives, histories, memories, and hopes are shared with both real and imagined audiences.

In our 2016 interview, the then-19-year-old university student Miski Omar shared that "the beauty of written poetry is that each person who reads it will interpret it in their own way" but expressed her concerns that authorial intent may be misunderstood. In contrast, "with spoken word, you see their body language, their gestures, their emotion, and some people cry on stage. So you really understand." In one of Miski's first poems that she shared on stage, called "Bitter Truth", she grappled with the concepts of cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation.²⁶ In our recent interview, she reflected on her introduction to spoken word poetry: "It was about naming injustices, claiming space as a Somali-Australian Muslim girl in Western Sydney. Now, almost ten years later, that urgency lives on in my filmmaking and writing. Spoken word trained me to see art as a civic act."

Jocson: Indeed, young people are creating works in various modes - audio or video recordings of reciting/sharing their poems, or even multimedia productions in collaboration with other artists.²⁷ These productions demonstrate youth's critical solidarity and shared critique against forms of injustice. These productions are reaching a wider audience than ever before, which, in a networked world, have the potential to inform or be in dialogue with other creations across space and time.

Curwood: Looking back over the decades we have spent researching poetry around the world, I am struck again by how it embraces speculative literacies, which foreground young people's creativity in (re)storying their engagement in modern democracy to advance equity and foster empathy. It's part of a wider speculative turn in civics that highlights the power of young people's radical imagination in shaping how they engage with and innovate artifacts, tools, and stories to build civic futures that are more sustainable and equitable.

We must first imagine new ways of being, relating, and connecting before we can bring them into existence. I believe that poetry has a way of "sustaining and healing our souls by serving as a tool of resistance," which can bring us together in collective action.²⁸

Jocson: Yes, we must. In considering poetry as a consciousness-raising tool to speak back,²⁹ a tool for resistance, I would like to return to an earlier point about bearing witness. A few years ago, Alisha Jean-Denis and I had an opportunity to think through how words heal and the link between literacy and healing-centered practices and the limits of socio-emotional learning.³⁰ We paused to ask about youth's well-being and the long history of dehumanization and terror that contour their lives. How might we (un)learn or engage in writing and learning differently? How might we steer clear of extractive practices and colonial legacies? Pedagogically, what might this look like or when young people demand other-wise?

[P]erhaps there is an opportunity to imagine healing (radical healing) in literacy practices where young people can engage desire and freedom and not (more) pain or broken-ness. Or poetry writing in a differently generative learning environment. Perhaps there is a way to consider bodily movements, emergent rhythms, and living intensities in a process of reconstituted racialising affect. To go beyond snaps and applauses in call-and-response. To interrogate the space in between line breaks or the punctuations that appear and disappear. To hear the penned yet unspoken language that may be pointing toward livingness. To be liberated from racial violence. [...] Perhaps young people desire something else or would prefer to exercise refusal, because every space is not a space for sharing-listening-witnessing.³¹

Curwood: I love how we have returned to the concepts of unlearning, radical healing, and belonging throughout our conversation. And how so many of the youth poets we once knew have now, decades on, continued to forge new paths as artists and activists.

Jocson: And now with bigger platforms that demonstrate the global cultural influence of spoken word poetry and writing in general. I am thinking about Chinaka Hodge, who I had the privilege to get to know through spoken word poetry in the Bay Area, including her book, For Girls With Hips,³² and whose work I have been fortunate enough to follow over the years. Her then-already growing cultural influence in slams while in high school was coupled with her growing presence and participation in Youth Speaks. More to the point. Have you seen the Marvel TV series Ironheart, which came out on Disney+? Hodge serves as head writer. Interestingly, in a podcast interview, Hodge reveals her style of running "a television writing room in a similar way that we would run a poetry workshop" and shares the "risk"-taking involved in the ebbs and flows of writing. "I'm really excited and really nervous and really precious about Ironheart that makes it feel like when I was writing poems when I was 13, like it feels like I'm risking something."³³ Writing for television and film is a bigger stage, for sure. I mention it here because throughout this conversation, we have been discussing processes of becoming and the ways in which poetry is shaping youth cultural practices and vice versa. Like Hodge, we are seeing more youth poets of yesterday who are becoming literary and cultural influences, continuing their writing, paving the way for future generations.

Curwood: I hear you. I'd love for you to share more about how you see the radical possibilities that emerge through poetry.

Jocson: This brings me full circle - how poetry is culturally-situated and consequential. That is, poetry is a social and cultural practice that is connected to and informed by young people's everyday life, where their experiences and interests shape the what, where, why, and how they do, including the activities and networks in which they engage across spaces of learning, homes, and communities. Their repertoires of practice are culturally situated.³⁴ With an understanding of poetry as part of youth's cultural repertoires of practice, I would also add that poetry is consequential. It opens up possibilities for dynamic worldmaking and, as I have said elsewhere, "writing about what matters most is where the possibilities lie."³⁵ Because poetry writing is consequential writing as it "cultivates both academic and critical literacies of historically marginalized communities in a way that encourages justice-oriented action, which ensures that community members actively shape community goals."³⁶

I recall Amanda Gorman taking the stage and reciting the poem "The Hill We Climb" at President Joe Biden's inauguration in Washington, D.C. It begins with a consequential question and ends with a sense of possibility:

When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
[...]
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid,
the new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it.
If only we're brave enough to be it.³⁷

This sun-filled inaugural moment further put a spotlight on the resurgence of spoken word poetry. Gorman has since published across literary genres. Her first children's book, Change Sings: A Children's Anthem, is a story about young people on a musical journey, coming together, and worldmaking.³⁸ It's an example of how contemporary youth poets are continuing to engage in processes of becoming, shaping lines of flight toward political action and civic transformation. Reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, there are once again thriving open mic events, and youth poetry slams are returning to many places. Who knows what the future will bring and who will be writing and creating more children's books? Who knows how these processes of becoming will shape the lives of many others and influence the reading and writing practices of future generations? The consequential also suggests the responsibility we have as educators and researchers shaping forms of inquiry toward transformation.³⁹

Curwood: In situating poetry as civic transformation, our conversation is grounded in the voices and hopes of poets who dare to speak truth to power. Miski touched on this in our recent interview: "Spoken word hands young people permission: to name what hurts, to dream what doesn't yet exist, to stand taller than the weight of their circumstances."

Jocson: It is why and how poetry matters in the lives of young people. And why literacies that consider poetry as a site of/for civic transformation are key to the continued work of all educators.

Just yesterday, my daughter and I were reading together. We are at a point where choosing books from the same shelf at home has pushed our practice. I picked up Elizabeth Acevedo's Poet X and she picked up Amanda Gorman's Change Sings - both New York Times Bestsellers.⁴⁰ Once again, in the fleeting moment of sitting and reading together, I was reminded of the power of words. And here we are, parents and educators on this page, thinking together about how youth poetry and spoken word performance have offered so much to the world. There is more work to do. I am grateful for learning with youth poets who have imparted their words and their writing practice. I am hopeful for what is to come.

Curwood: Thank you for this conversation. I am grateful for this opportunity to reflect on our experiences with poetry, and how we have framed poetry as a site of/for civic transformation. Because poetry communities are incredibly inclusive, creative, collaborative, performative, and speculative—and as you noted, culturally situated and consequential—they can open up new possibilities for civic action.

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Jen Scott Curwood is Associate Professor in English Education and Media Studies in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at The University of Sydney in Australia, Director of the Sydney Games and Play Lab, and core member of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Trust, and Governance. Her research explores the intersections of literacy, creativity, and technology in order to advance social change and build more sustainable futures. As a university teacher educator, she examines how teachers can leverage innovative technologies to cultivate young peoples' digital and critical literacies.

Korina M. Jocson is a professor of digital futures at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her scholarly interests include youth literacies and cultural studies, technologies and learning ecologies, race and ethnic studies in education, and critical methodologies. Forms of inquiry are prompted by questions about knowledge-making while addressing educational and social inequities across settings.

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References

1. Harry Boyte, "A Different Kind of Politics: John Dewey and the Meaning of Citizenship in the 21st Century," The Good Society 12, no. 2 (2003): 1-15. ↩︎
2. Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia, "Civic Participation Re-Imagined: Youth Interrogation and Innovation in the Multimodal Public Sphere." Review of Research in Education 41, no. 1 (2017): 136-158. ↩︎
3. Hava Rachel Gordon, "Allies Within and Without: How Adolescent Activists Conceptualize Ageism and Navigate Adult Power in Youth Social Movements," Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36, no. 6 (2007): 631-68. ↩︎
4. See, for instance, Jen Scott Curwood, "'My Beating and Bleeding Heart for All of You': Enacting Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy through Spoken Word Poetry," Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 68, no. 2 (2024): 152-161. http://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1374; Jen Scott Curwood and Katherine Bull, "In Their Own Words: Amplifying Critical Literacy and Social Justice Pedagogy through Spoken Word Poetry," English in Education 57, no. 3 (2023): 154-168. https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2023.2183837; Jen Scott Curwood and Katelyn Jones, "A Bridge across Our Fears: Understanding Spoken Word Poetry in Troubled Times." Literacy 56, no. 1 (2022): 50-58. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12270;
   Erin Kim-Rich and Jen Scott Curwood, "Literacies, Language, and Schooling: Exploring Writing Pedagogy for English Language Learners," International Encyclopedia of Education, 4th ed., ed. R. J. Tierney, F. Rizvi, and K. Erkica (London: Elsevier, 2023): 65-75. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818630-5.07057-3; and Katelyn Jones and Jen Scott Curwood, "Tell the Story, Speak the Truth: Creating a Third Space through Spoken Word Poetry," Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 64, no. 3 (2020): 281-289. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1080. ↩︎
5. Korina M. Jocson. "Beyond Borders: Poetry Slicing through Steel Gates and Barbed Wires." English Journal 93, no. 3 (2004): 15-16. ↩︎
6. Korina M. Jocson, Youth Poets: Empowering Literacies in and out of Schools (Peter Lang, 2008). ↩︎
7. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, 1981). ↩︎
8. Korina M. Jocson and Takeo Rivera, "Toward a Theory of Poemness: Cultural Politics and Transformative Pedagogies," Handbook of Cultural Politics and Education, ed. Z. Leonardo (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2010), 538. ↩︎
9. Jocson and Rivera, "Toward a Theory of Poemness," 537. ↩︎
10. See Cati, de Los Rios, Yared Portillo, and Bryan Cantero, "Critical Worldmaking through Balladry: Youth Corrido Literacies as a Lived Civic Poetic," Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 66, no. 2 (2022): 55-59. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1251; Nicole Mirra and Antero Garcia. Civics for the World to Come: Committing to Democracy in Every Classroom (Norton Professional Books, 2023); and Jacqueline Woodson and Bettina L. Love, "Outstanding: Centering Black Kids' Enoughness in Civic Education Research," Multicultural Perspectives 21, no. 2 (2019): 91-96. https://doi.org/10.1080/15210960.2019.1606631. ↩︎
11. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press,1984), 37. ↩︎
12. June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays (South End Press, 1985), 14. ↩︎
13. Anita Harris, Hernan Cuervo, and Johanna Wyn, Thinking about Belonging in Youth Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). ↩︎
14. Marco Antonsich, "Searching for Belonging: An Analytical Framework," Geography Compass 4, no. 6 (2010): 644-659. ↩︎
15. See bell hooks, Belonging: a culture of place (Routledge, 2009). ↩︎
16. Korina M. Jocson, "Poetry in a New Race Era," Daedalus: Journal of the Academy of Arts & Sciences 140, no. 1 (2011): 154-162. ↩︎
17. Floya Anthias, "Belongings in a Globalising and Unequal World: Rethinking Translocations," in The Situated Politics of Belonging, ed. Nira Yuval-Davis, Kalpana Kannabiran, and Urvashi Vieten, 17-31 (Sage, 2006), 21. ↩︎
18. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (Routledge, 1987). ↩︎
19. H. Samy Alim, "Global Hip Hop: Style, Language, Globalization," in A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed. Alessandro Duranti, Richard George, and R. C. Riner, 139-155 (Wiley, 2023). ↩︎
20. Curwood, "My Beating and Bleeding Heart"; Curwood and Jones, "A Bridge across Our Fears"; Jones and Curwood, "Tell the Story, Speak the Truth." ↩︎
21. The Real Talkers, "I Am Proud of Who I Am." Bankstown Poetry Slam 2018, uploaded March 20, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZfLgyXSkzk&list=PLbaHAjdOPQfVrsfPjuv1wqRrIn3iG-4Ye&index=8&t=9s ↩︎
22. Grace D. Player, "'My Color of My Name': Composing Critical Self-Celebration with Girls of Color through a Feminist of Color Writing Pedagogy," Research in the Teaching of English 55, no. 3 (2021): 216-240. https://doi.org/10.58680/rte202131184. ↩︎
23. For example: Maisha Fisher, Writing in Rhythm: Spoken Word Poetry in Urban Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 2007); Jocson, Youth Poets; Ruth H. Kim, "'Never Knew Literacy Could Get at My Soul': On How Words Matter for Youth, or Notes Toward Decolonizing Literacy," Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 35, no. 5 (2013): 392-407, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2013.842868; and Vajra M. Watson, "Life as Primary Text: English Classrooms as Sites for Soulful Learning," The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning 22, no. 4 (2017): 6-18, https://doi.org/10.7290/jaepl222jli. ↩︎
24. Solmaz Sharif, "KR Conversations: Solmaz Sharif," Kenyon Review, https://kenyonreview.org/conversation/solmaz-sharif/. ↩︎
25. Pablo C. Ramirez, and Margarita Jimenez-Silva, "The Intersectionality of Culturally Responsive Teaching and Performance Poetry: Validating Secondary Latino Youth and Their Community," Multicultural Perspectives 17, no. 2 (2015): 87-92. https://doi.org/10.1080/15210960.2015.1022448. ↩︎
26. Miski, "Bitter Truths." Bankstown Poetry Slam 2016, uploaded October 25, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kepNpVxpeuQ. ↩︎
27. Korina M. Jocson, "Remix Revisited: Critical Solidarity in Youth Media Arts," E-Learning and Digital Media 10, no. 1 (2013): 68-82. Korina M. Jocson and Ashley Carpenter, "Translocal Assemblage and the Practice of Alternative Media Toward Racial Justice: A Pedagogical Perspective," Critical Studies in Education 60, no. 2 (2016): 245-262. ↩︎
28. Gwendolyn Baxley and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, "In the Black Radical Tradition: Poetry as a Praxis for Healing and Resistance in Education," Research in the Teaching of English 55, no. 3 (2021): 311-321. ↩︎
29. Jordan, On Call. ↩︎
30. See Ginwright, Shawn. Hope and Healing in Urban Education: How Urban Activists and Teachers are Reclaiming Matters of the Heart, (Routledge, 2016). Also, Camangian, Patrick, and Stephanie Cariaga. "Social and Emotional Learning is Hegemonic Miseducation: Students Deserve Humanization Instead," Race Ethnicity and Education 25, no. 7 (2021): 901-921. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1798374. ↩︎
31. Alisha S. Jean-Denis and Korina M. Jocson, "'Because I Won't Ever Forget': Toward Livingness in Youth Poetry," Journal of Juvenilia Studies 4, no. 1 (2021): 41-50. doi:10.29173/jjs75. ↩︎
32. Chinaka Hodge, For Girls with Hips: Collected Poems and Writings (First Word Press, 2006). ↩︎
33. Paola Mardo, Paola, host, In Proximity, "In Proximity Special: Ironheart with Chinaka Hodge," Proximity Media (July 3, 2025). ↩︎
34. Kris Gutiérrez and Barbara Rogoff, "Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice?" Educational Researcher 32, no. 5 (2003): 19-25. Carol D. Lee, Culture, Literacy and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind (Teachers College Press, 2007). ↩︎
35. Jocson, "Poetry in a New Race Era." ↩︎
36. Sakeena Everett, "'Untold Stories': Cultivating Consequential Writing with a Black Male Student through a Critical Approach to Metaphor," Research in the Teaching of English 53, no. 1 (2018): 34-57. ↩︎
37. Amanda Gorman, The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country (Penguin/Random House, 2021). ↩︎
38. Amanda Gorman, Change Sings: A Children's Anthem, illus. Loren Long (Penguin/Random House, 2021). ↩︎
39. H. Richard Milner, "2023 AERA Presidential Address: A Framework for Designing Consequential Research," Educational Researcher 54, no. 2 (2024): 67-77. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X241298244. ↩︎
40. Elizabeth Acevedo, The Poet X (New York: HarperTeen, 2018). Gorman, Change Sings. ↩︎