In the spring of 2026, we were pleased to work with Genesee Hill Elementary School first and second graders to create original poetry. This web page and our anthology of the student’s poems are the culmination of this project, in which students from four classrooms worked with Jack Straw’s professional writer Vicky Edmonds to write their own poetry. This is our seventh year working with Genesee Hill Elementary students to help them create and share their poetry and build respect for each other’s experiences, and we look forward to many more.

We created an anthology of the students’ poems, Bringing Hope, and shared it with everyone who participated.

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“Again, I am so grateful to have gotten to work with Jack Straw Cultural Center and the teachers at Genesee Hill to help their students write these poems that are so incredibly moving to me,” writes Vicky. “So often it’s out of the mouths of children that we hear the most profound things . . . they bring such sincerity in their ways of seeing that they wake us up from our accidentally rote ways of living.”

Bringing Hope: Genesee Hill Elementary Poetry was produced by Genesee Hill Elementary School students and Jack Straw Cultural Center with the generous support of the Washington State Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and The Creative Advantage, and individual donors.

The Jack Straw team included writer Vicky Edmonds, designer Levi Fuller, project coordinator Daniel Guenther, and Executive Director Joan Rabinowitz. Photos by Sherwin Eng. Special thanks to the students of Genesee Hill Elementary and Genesee Hill staff. We especially want to thank teachers Alison Aylesworth, Danielle Jones, Renee Marroquin, and Erin Munavu, who helped make this project possible.

Cover photo by David Seibold, used under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 2.0.

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