Photo courtesy of Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
As a student, English was always my favorite subject. I can still recall reading the works of renowned poets like Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou for the first time in middle school, learning how art can function as a salve, or how, years later, the first line of Mary Oliver’s beloved 1986 poem “Wild Geese” stopped me in my tracks. Analyzing each line of their stanzas to extract meaning felt like solving a puzzle bit by bit, how the big picture becomes clearer with each fitted piece. It felt like waking up.
“Poetry is a genre that touches hearts like no other genre does,” said John Warner Smith, Louisiana’s Poet Laureate, who was recently awarded a prestigious Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets (AAP). One of twenty-three honorees across the country to receive the $50,000 award, Smith was chosen in part for the strength of his proposed community project. This fall, Smith will conduct youth poetry workshops in the Louisiana Delta region, specifically within East Carroll, Morehouse, Madison, and Tensas parishes. Smith, a Morgan City native and longtime public education reform advocate, was appointed to the state’s two-year ambassadorship last August.
“I had a personal connection there, so I wanted to go back to those communities as Poet Laureate and help them to understand and appreciate the power of poetry,” said Smith. “It has done so much to enrich my life, and I wanted to give some of that back to these children.”
The workshops will begin in October or November and run through spring 2021, Smith said, though the format is dependent on the circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic in the coming months.
“We're honored to be able to select John Warner Smith, Louisiana's first African American male Poet Laureate,” said AAP President and Executive Director Jennifer Benka. “We took note of his collaboration with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and local schools, and the fact that he will be conducting poetry workshops for young people in four under-resourced parishes in Northeast Louisiana.”
The Southern University English professor has long sought to offer this sort of creative programming to young people especially. Smith believes poetry offers a vehicle for self-expression that, once taught, can inspire a lifelong love of the literary form. “This is a journey I’m hoping will carry on with these students for the rest of their lives.”
