Stories of Arrival: Refugee & Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project
Founded by Merna in 2009, the Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry project took place at Foster High School in Tukwila, WA, one of the most language and culturally diverse high schools in the U.S. Foster High School MLL teacher Carrie Stradley co-directed the project with Merna. The project took place in Carrie’s classroom. From the outset, the project was affiliated with the Institute for Poetic Medicine (IPM) as an IPM Poetry Partner Project as well as a longstanding partnership with Seattle’s Jack Straw Cultural Center.
Most of the students in the project migrated from their home countries due to war, violence, poverty, lack of education and health care, climate disruptions, and other untenable situations that affected their own and their families’ safety and survival. A number of them lived in refugee camps before arriving in the U.S. Merna’s innovative approach to teaching poetry provided safe space for the students to tell the deeply personal and often harrowing stories that honored their migration journeys and gave witness to their courage and resilience. The young people in the project found that through poetry they could find ways to articulate their own sense of longing, grief and hope connected to both the experience of living through heartbreaking conflicts and to their dreams of how they want to contribute to creating peaceful solutions to violent conflicts and the effects of poverty, climate disruption and discrimination. Through their creative writing they envisioned a more peaceful, humane and sustainable world which is a tribute both to them and to the power of poetry.
The years of collaboration with Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle provided these young poets an opportunity to record their poetry in a state of the art studio, which was a highlight each year of the Stories of Arrival project. At the culmination of each project the students received printed, bound anthologies of their poetry. Over their years of collaborating Merna and Carrie have held community wide poetry readings for each anthology release celebration. These were thrilling occasions for the young poets when they took to the microphone and presented their poetry delighting and moving enthusiastic audiences.
The Stories of Arrival project has been featured on national and local NPR radio programs; on KBCS Radio; in the Seattle Times and other local and regional newspapers; as part of the King County 4 Culture Poetry on the Buses contest with eight winners; on numerous blogs, websites, and in curriculum guides; in national magazines and journals including the Teachers and Writers Collaborative Magazine and Skipping Stones an award winning Multicultural Magazine for Young People; on the Global Law Associates Immigration Law blog; and it was spotlighted on the Academy of American Poets written and audio blog and on their Children’s Poet Laureate website under the direction of Naomi Shihab Nye. Over the years of Stories of the Arrival Poetry project and Word Travels projects at Foster High School Merna has worked with over three hundred and twenty students from forty one different countries.
Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike. Shunpike is the 501(c)(3) non-profit agency that provides independent arts groups in Washington State with the services, resources, and opportunities they need to forge their own paths to sustainable success.