Author Archives: Emily Southerton
About Emily Southerton
Emily Southerton (Delta '10) is a teacher and poet who created and runs The Poet Warriors Project. Emily is currently traveling across the country teaching poetry writing in low-income public middle schools and collecting original student poems for publication. In doing so, she hopes to empower students as community and self-advocates and highlight student voices in the American dialogue of change. Emily is a native of Mifflinburg, a small farming town in central PA, and a poet herself. She graduated as Class Poet from Villanova University in '10 and went on to teach English and Music in Jackson, MS, where the poems, songs, and powerful voices of Rowan middle-schoolers were so compelling, she had to create a project through which to publish them.From Reluctant Writer, to Poet Warrior
As I left the Navajo Reservation in Crownpoint, New Mexico and headed north toward Denver, Colorado, my 4th stop on the Poet Warriors Project, I was reflecting on Adam Perry, and several students like him who I have encountered on ...
National Poetry Month: Let Your Students Astound You
When we read the lines, “Between Walls/the back wings/of the/hospital where/nothing/will grow lie/cinders/in which shine/the broken/pieces of a green/bottle,” on the last day of my poetry unit, I ask my middle schoolers to discuss in groups what it means to ...
First Rule of Poetry: Learn the Rules to Break Them
I’m in western New Mexico and it’s snowing on Navajo Nation. Outside, fields of grasses stretch far as the eye can see, swaying under a nearly full moon, and the flat tops of red mesas grow taller with the piling ...
One Alum Turns Students Into Poet Warriors
“When my dad left, I was full of waterfalls,” Sierra wrote. Sierra is a 6th grader in one of Ms. Taylor Stafford’s (Detroit, ’11) ELA classes. Her middle school sits off 7-mile road in northern Detroit, and was the first of ...
