🌟 Creative Writing, Voice, and Storytelling Spaces for Students

Cowrie Crossings offers youth-centered poetry workshops for middle and high school students designed to help young people explore language as a tool for creativity, reflection, and self-expression. These workshops create a supportive, low-pressure environment where students can write from lived experience, imagination, joy, curiosity, or anywhere in between.

Poetry is one of the most accessible and liberatory art forms: it allows youth to name their worlds, shape their inner lives, and practice telling the truth in their own voice. In these workshops, students are invited into writing as possibility — not performance.

Each session is carefully designed to be emotionally safe and trauma-informed. Students are never pressured to share personal stories aloud. Instead, they are offered multiple ways to participate, including the option to write under a poetry pen name and submit work anonymously if they would like their words witnessed without being identified.

Students will:

• Explore poetry as voice, power, and creativity

• Write poems rooted in memory, identity, community, or imagination

• Learn accessible poetic tools such as imagery, repetition, and metaphor

• Practice self-expression without judgment or grading

• Share only if they choose, with anonymous options always available

Workshops can be tailored to different age groups and themes, including identity and belonging, joy and resilience, community storytelling, dreaming the future, Black history, and cultural inheritance.

Ideal for:

Schools, English classrooms, after-school programs, youth organizations, libraries, and special cultural programming throughout the year.

To inquire about booking a poetry workshop for your students or community, please email Maya at cowriecrossings@gmail.com, or reach out directly through the contact page.