“There's a Better Word”: Urban Youth Rewriting Their Social Worlds Through Poetry

Recent studies undertaken with sociocultural perspectives on literacy offer a framework through which to explore poetry in youth's lives. This article draws upon works within New Literacy Studies to provide a glimpse of urban high school youth's experiences in a unique program called Poetry for the People (P4P). It identifies some ways in which these experiences have been valuable in acquisition of writing skills, confidence in learning, self‐awareness, and development of social conscience. The view of poetry presented affirms the importance of students' voices in the writing and learning process. It highlights how acknowledging students' interests in and abilities to produce sophisticated poems can create different possibilities for enhancing students' literacy development. The import of poetry for young people's identities, in particular emergent identities as empowered citizens and writers, examined within the context of P4P advances current perspectives on how poetry can be used for effective writing instruction in and out of schools.