A Poets Online For Kids

Recently, I reconnected with Laura Shovan who had been teaching and writing poetry in New Jersey and was an early contributor to Poets Online.

She moved to Maryland some years ago and we only seemed to connect every other year at the Dodge Poetry Festival. She still checks in on the the site and was coincidentally working on a series of poems in response to the Stafford poems in “The Darkness Around Us is Deep.” Hopefully, one of those will fit this month's prompt and find its way onto Poets Online.

Laura has made poetry her vocation these days with workshops and readings. She read last weekend with Lucille Clifton as part of the Columbia Festival of the Arts along with a group of contributors to a local literary magazine called the “Little Patuxent Review.”

Her new project is creating her Mrs. Poems site which is still under construction, but will have a poetry prompt for kids with the ability to submit poems. Laura says that it is, "Modeled after your site, of course! Let me know what you think – I’d love your comments and suggestions."

Poets Online has always had an audience with teachers and contributions from students, though many of the prompts are not really appropriate to kids, so I find a site that offers prompts and a chance to publish online for kids to be really exciting. Give Laura's project a look, and let her know your thoughts about poetry prompts and children's poetry.