Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Voices From Verse: The Power Of Poetry For Seattle's Homeless Youth, Savannah Grace Hadley

Honors Projects

This paper is a creative nonfiction essay combining research, interviews, and personal experience to discuss how and why poetry is helpful in a therapeutic context, specifically working with at-risk youth. Pongo, a program that provides incarcerated youth an opportunity to write poetry, under the direction of Richard Gold, has found through survey responses that with the Pongo Teen Writing Method “100 percent of youth enjoyed the writing experience, 98 percent were proud of their writing, and 73 percent wrote on topics they don’t normally talk about” (Gold, 21). I came to understand, through time volunteering with the writing groups at …