We hope that you’ll leave with new ideas, new poems, and new confidence in your understanding of crafting, revising, and performing poetry for children.Ĭommitment Required for the Best ExperienceĪs an in-person event at our Retreat Center, you’ll have a chance to step away from everyday life to experience the workshop.

Attention will be paid to your own works-in-progress and ideas through 1:1 meetings with your faculty and small group workshopping sessions. In addition to exploring the make-up and markets of poetry, we’ll also talk about interacting with your audience through powerful poetry performances.

We will also bring in the foundations of poetry, and look to a diverse array of examples as we create our own pieces. Our sessions will offer an overview of the many opportunities poets have when writing for children and teens. Join celebrated poets and verse novelists Irene Latham and Charles Waters, and their virtual guest, editor Carol Hinz, to learn ways to weave words, sounds, and stories into engaging poetry for children. Told in 14 distinct voices, including that of the ship that brought them to the American shores and the founder of African Town, this powerfully affecting historical novel-in-verse recreates a pivotal moment in US and world history, the impacts of which we still feel today.Poetry anthologies, stand alone poems, lyrical picture books, narrative picture books, and verse novels make up the colorful fabric of poetic offerings to children. At the end of the Civil War, the survivors created a community for themselves they called African Town, which still exists to this day. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they’d been delivered. In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Poetry, Historical Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Young Adult LiteratureĬhronicling the story of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860, African Town is a powerful and stunning novel-in-verse.

African Town by Irene Latham