Apply to Attend the Fall 2025 Teachers Institute Today!
Join us October 24–26, 2025 for the Fall 2025 Teachers Institute, a free three-day professional development event presented by the University of Arizona Poetry Center in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. Designed for middle and high school educators, the Institute offers hands-on workshops, inspiring seminars, and opportunities to connect with fellow teachers, librarians, and teaching artists.
Our June application round filled about half of our available spaces—now’s your chance to apply during the second application period, open August 5–29. This year’s theme, Community Publishing & Poetic Belonging, invites participants to explore ways to share poetry with the community and establish literary connection.
Who can apply?
Educators who work with middle and high school students, including classroom teachers, librarians, and teaching artists, with priority given to Arizona-based educators.
Visit our Teachers Institute page learn more, read FAQs, and apply: https://poetry.arizona.edu/education/k-12-youth/2025-teachers-institute
Below, we are excited to share the descriptions of the workshops and seminars we will be offering:
Seminars
Each day of the Institute will feature 1-2 seminars for the full group.
1) Poets in the Classroom: How to Use Voca
Led by: Poetry Center Library Team
Join our library team for an exploration of Voca, the Poetry Center's online audiovisual archive. The archive houses a stunning collection of recordings from the Poetry Center's Reading Series, dating from the 1960s to the present and featuring luminaries like Nikki Giovanni, W. S. Merwin, Joy Harjo, and Ada Limón alongside emerging artists. We'll show you how to navigate the archive and locate material, and we will demonstrate some of the lesson plans and writing prompts we have developed using the Voca archive.
2) Making Public Art: Why Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Matter
Led by: Alley Cat Murals
In this seminar, we’ll meet artists who've worked with Alley Cat Murals - a local arts organization creating public works in the city of Tucson. We’ll discuss their history of coordinating civic engagement projects, soliciting community participation and facilitating arts opportunities that foster diversity, equity and inclusion.
3) Poem Meets World: Building Creativity-Centered Classrooms
Led by: Logan Phillips
There are so many ways of welcoming a poem into the world: print anthologies, open mics, chapbooks, TikTok videos, dance collaborations – there are no rules and no limits! But what are the mechanics of creating a classroom culture that centers collaboration and celebrates self-expression? Poet Logan Phillips draws on his two decades of experience as a teaching artist and classroom teacher to share pedagogies of liberation, lesson-ready practices and the secret ingredients of amplifying student voice.
4) Zines as ___: resisting, remembering, and reaching each other through DIY publishing
Led by: Ames (Amanda Meeks)
Zines are independently published, often experimental, booklets that promote knowledge-sharing and grassroots activism. They have also historically been used to document and uplift histories, voices, and narratives that would otherwise be lost or erased. This seminar will highlight the benefits to young (and old) people in expressing themselves politically, creatively, authentically, and freely through zine making. We’ll consider how teaching with zines can transform your classroom or community and ultimately inspire a sense of hope, belonging, and purpose during a particularly challenging moment in our collective history.
Workshops
Each attendee will participate in four workshops over the course of the weekend. Here are the ten exciting options this year:
1) Community Building Through Poetry: “You Bring Out the … In Me” Exercise and Novels-in-Verse
Led by: Torran Anderson
This hands-on workshop introduces a community-centered poetry exercise—“You Bring Out the … In Me”—designed to deepen belonging, creative expression, and public engagement among middle and high school students. Originating from a Fulbright project in Norway and later adapted for language learners in the United States, this exercise has helped participants explore identity, culture, and connection through poetry.
2) To Inhabit Another Voice: Personification & Persona
Led by: Sean Avery Medlin
"To Inhabit Another Voice” is a generative and reflective creative writing workshop for both high school students and community members. This workshop focuses on two potent poetic tools—persona and personification—to help participants explore stories, identities, and perspectives beyond their own, or parallel to their own. These techniques can do more than embellish poetry; they can nurture emotional intelligence, deepen critical thinking, and provide space for creative exploration and/or challenge of self and society.
3) That’s So Random! Tools for Breaking Out of the Narrative Box
Led by: Logan Phillips
A hands-on exploration of activities to gamify writing, in order to help students in grades 5-12 explore the materiality of language, contend with new approaches, and listen to multilingual voices. By inviting students to work in pairs, exploring together writing which incorporates elements of “random chance,” we remove the requirement for silence and invite students to puzzle through language collaboratively. The goal is building social cohesion and cultivating a classroom culture of self-expression.
4) Nature Poems for Climate Action: Creating and Performing Poetry for the Community
Led by: Kristen Sawyer
Our natural world sparks wonder in students, and provides them with models of resilience, connection and hope. But how do we spark inspiration into action? One way: poetry shared in community. In this workshop, we’ll spotlight an environmental nonprofit in Yosemite that uses nature metaphor poems as a catalyst for change. Participants will receive nature poem lesson plans and learn how to prepare students to confidently perform poems in a community event that inspires action.
5) The Chapbook Project: Empowering Student Writers through Bookmaking
Led by: Peyton Stark
In this workshop, we will learn about the history, art, and practical potential of the chapbook in the middle and high school classroom. Educators will investigate ways to publish student writing in the form of the chapbook, and will see sample curriculum and student work. Participants will learn two book-binding techniques and will come away with two handmade books to use in their classrooms or personal writing practice.
6) Exploring the Art Element, Space: Differentiate Instruction for Language Learners
Led by: Allison Miller
The presentation will review several lessons designed to teach students about the art element, Space. These lessons are structured to support Multi Language Learners through a variety of differentiated instruction techniques: visuals, graphic organizers, word banks, and sentence stems. These lessons are also structured to celebrate the cultural identities of Multi Language Learners while fostering reading, writing, and speaking skills.
7) Where I’m From, Where We Belong: Poetry for Resilience and Connection
Led by: Christine Hoekenga
In this interactive workshop, participants will consider scientific research into poetry’s effects on mental and physical health and engage experientially with two accessible model texts: "what can a poem do?" by Darius V. Daughtry and "Where I’m From" by George Ella Lyon. Through discussion and collaborative writing, educators will explore ways to help students and staff identify as poets, share their inner worlds, build trust, and create powerful collective reflections in the classroom and beyond.
8) Spit Temples: Ritual Weaving of Auditory Found Poems with Bibliomancy
Led by: Taylor Johnson
Bibliomancy, the divinatory practice of opening a book and reading a sentence or short passage as an answer to a question, will inform our compositional process. Inspired by Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña’s understanding of the quipu, an ancient form of communication generated through the tying of knots within yarn, workshop attendees will create auditory found poems conceived as messages from our wise and kind ancestors using bibliomancy with books on UA Poetry Center’s library shelves.
9) Make a Tanka poem with a mini zine
Led by: Amber McCrary
Learn to make a mini zine and a tanka poem all in one session! In this interactive workshop, you will learn how to create a mini zine and a tanka poem. You will also have the option to walk away with the tanka template to create with your students.
10) Constructing Poem Homes: A Blueprint to Two Invitational Book Forms
Led by: Marianna ColesCurtis and Ryan Greene
Join us for a hands-on workshop where we’ll transform simple materials into two sculptural books that you can create with middle and high-school students. Because they are beautiful, unusual, and portable, these book forms invite engagement with poetry through tactility, delight, and whimsy and lend themselves to populating public space!
We hope you join us on October 24, 25 & 26!