Lewisburg Area Schools will once again be infused with a new era of creative writing enlightenment, and Bucknell students are at the forefront of it. Sixteen Bucknell students enrolled in a new National Poetry Month Project course are leading poetry workshops with students from grades one through 12 in the school district; their outreach began on Monday, March 17, and will extend a few weeks into April.
This will be the second year of the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts’ effort to lead poetry workshops in Lewisburg schools to commemorate April’s National Poetry Month. Students and faculty from the Stadler Center led workshops for about 1,400 students in 79 classrooms in all grades in last year’s inaugural run of the project.
The National Poetry Month Project course is taught by Jessica Nirvana Ram, the publicity & outreach manager of the Stadler Center. For more than a month, Bucknell students have been preparing to lead poetry classes for students from all grade levels under her tutelage.
“We’re running the class as a pedagogy class to give students more preparation before sending them off into the schools,” Ram says. “We’re really excited about it being a class that gets students more comfortable before they go into the classroom. We’re hoping each student will teach, at minimum, four classes, and we’re hoping for them to do up to five.”
Because the program is now in its second year and newly developed as a course, Ram’s ambition is that the collaboration will become an annual event. Ram hopes the program inspires future young poets while also advancing the Stadler Center’s mission of fostering an appreciation for the diversity and richness of contemporary poetry and literary arts among all students.
“We’re hoping the class will be successful and we can make it a yearly offering. This is something that the students get credit for [as a course] as well as something they can put on their resumes,” Ram says. “Our goal is to get poetry into the community, and this feels like a concrete way to do that. All of the teachers we’ve been in touch with are super excited and want to get involved.”
Just like last year, Lewisburg students will be encouraged to submit their poetry for a chance to share it during a National Poetry Month Community Reading on Wednesday, April 30, at 5 p.m. in Bucknell Hall, home to the Stadler Center. One student from each grade will be chosen to read their poetry at the free, public event.
