Welcome to the first installment of Poets in the Pews – where a poet attends a Town Hall event and writes a poem about the experience afterwards.

Maia Ruth Pody, an 11th grader at the Center School, is a Youth Poet Laureate as part of Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools (WITS). She attended Town Hall’s recent Blair Imani event where Imani discussed her new book, Modern HERstory: Stories of Women and Nonbinary People Rewriting History. You can watch the event here.

Feminist Sapphics

How were green things torn from the frozen earth? The

ice around the dirt wasn’t merely melted

by a smiling sunlight; it split apart when

        thousands of hands tore

through the ground like ice picks. Behind these clawing

fingers are the fighters, the apoplectic

mothers, tired heroines. Sympathetic

        characters aren’t

working for our modern subconscious. We need

new intelligentsia, ready for the

stories grown from malnourished roots that elder

        women replanted

and their daughters nurtured. The expectation

wasn’t endless martyrdom, so when silence

greets those declarations of reparations

        owed, we speak louder.

There will be a Seattle Youth Poet Laureate & Writers in the Schools reading on 12/3 at Elliott Bay Book Company!

The Seattle Youth Poet Laureate is a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools (WITS). Founded in Seattle in 2015 by WITS writers Matt Gano and Aaron Counts, the YPL program aims to identify young writers and leaders who are committed to civic and community engagement through their poetry and performance. Each year, a cohort of students work together throughout the year to share their powerful voices, leadership, and love of community at events throughout the region, and the Youth Poet Laureate also gets a book deal with Poetry NW Books to publish a collection of their poems which is released in May. Learn more, here.

Photo by Rick Sood.

Photo by Rick Sood.