Poetry Daily is thrilled to announce the expansion of Poetry Alive!, a program designed to inspire and empower students at the Fairfax County Juvenile Detention Center (FCJDC) through interactive workshops centered on contemporary poetry. Now in its third year, Poetry Alive! will extend its reach to a new site, the Patrick Molinari Juvenile Detention Center in Prince William County. Poetry Alive! sends teaching fellows recruited from the MFA Creating Writing program into the FCJDC and Molinari Shelter to teach interactive poetry workshops. At the FCJDC, the teaching fellows work with students in the BETA program—a year-long therapeutic initiative for male residents aged 14-17. The Molinari Shelter in contrast to the program at FCJDC, is in a non-secure facility that acts as an alternative to detention or emergency placements for youths aged 11-17. Through this expansion, George Mason MFA students are gaining experience teaching a wider age range of students as well as teaching both male and female students.
Dr. Ronald., Med’02, the supervisor of education at the Patrick Molinari Juvenile Detention Center, discovered Poetry Alive!’s work through an article in Mason Spirit. Having started his career in education at the Fairfax County Juvenile Detention Center, Pannell quickly saw the value of implementing a similar program at the Molinari Shelter to help students express their emotions through poetry. He secured funding through a Virginia Department of Education grant and collaborated with Poetry Daily and the George Mason University MFA program to bring the initiative to life at the Molinari Shelter this Fall.
The program at Molinari employs five teaching fellows, four MFA graduate students and one undergraduate student Faith Baylor who is participating in the program as part of her practicum coursework as part of the Poetry Daily course. Katey Funderburgh, MFA’26 and Nicolas Ritter, MFA’25, are the two lead teaching fellows expanding the program to the Molinari Shelter. Ritter and Funderburgh both participated as teaching fellows last Spring in Poetry Alive! and are extremely passionate about the program, expressing the devastations and joys of their efforts.
Katey Funderburgh, MFA'26
“Every time we step into the JDC, I’m reminded that prisons should not exist, and poetry does not release these students from the prison industrial complex,” stated Funderburgh. “But the poetry of our students does actively work against the erasure of their voices. We spend each Poetry Alive! session introducing the students to new poets, discussing what different poems mean and how they’re crafted, and then we watch and listen as they take these tools into their own hands— whenever I am lucky enough to hear a student read their own poetry aloud, I remember that this is why I’m here, this is what poetry is for.”
Nicolas Ritter, MFA'25
Ritter, who has been working in the JDC for three years, shares these sentiments. “Every time I enter the classroom, I feel so incredibly lucky for the opportunity to teach these students,” said Ritter. “Our students have voices of their own, and our sessions are just chances for these students to express those voices in new and creative ways. Working with Poetry Alive! has shown me a pathway for poetry to work in the world in ways I hadn’t imagined before. Our work makes a direct and tangible difference, however small that difference may be, and I think that carries tremendous value.”
McKinley Johnson, MFA’27
Martheaus Perkins, MFA ’26 and McKinley Johnson, MFA’27 also work alongside Funderburgh and Ritter, expressing with the same fervor the incredible impact Poetry Alive! has had on incarcerated youths and their own lives.
“While I have only recently started working with Poetry Alive!, I already feel changed as a person and a poet because of the program,” stated Johnson, a first-year MFA student at George Mason University. “Every time I enter the classroom, I am heartbroken and infuriated at the systems in place that have led these children there. When I leave, I am hopeful that the time we were able to spend with them—discussing poets that look and sound like them and reading poems about experiences they can relate to—and that the art they created will be a tool they can use as they continue through life.”
Martheaus Perkins, MFA ’26
“This program allowed me to discover what I hope can be life-long work,” remarked Perkins. “After spending time in the classroom with these young students discussing rhythm, ways to be empathetic, justice work, and amazing poets and lyricists, it's clear to me that this kind of work should be done more often and in more places. I've been humbled, stunned, and educated by those kids.”
Founded in 1997, Poetry Daily is a 501(c)3 non-profit daily anthology of contemporary poetry that moved to George Mason in 2019 to continue its work connecting readers to the finest contemporary poetry and to serve as a learning lab for George Mason students in teaching the art and practice of poetry publishing, Poetry Alive! is modeled after the successful pilot program initiated in spring 2022 in partnership with Poetry Daily by the inaugural Fairfax Poet Laureate, Nicole Tong and has continued with the support of funding from ArtsFairfax. Poetry Daily strives to make the brightest thinking and writing in poetry accessible to everyone, both in Poetry Daily‘s local, physical community, and to its 570,000 readers across the world.
Poetry Alive is made possible in part by ArtsFairfax. Poetry Alive was also supported, in part, by the Virginia Commission for the Arts, which receives support from the Virginia General Assembly and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
December 12, 2024