"Because I won't ever forget"

Towards Livingness in Youth Poetry

Abstract

Poetry within trauma-informed literacies has been influential to understanding youth writing. As the tendency to focus on the individual rather than structures of power remains, the authors of this essay point to collective resistance and connect youth writing to other creative texts in their engagement of black life, livingness, and pedagogical possibilities. Specifically, they draw on black feminist theories and methodologies to consider race, gender, class, diaspora, and time-space in poetry and juvenilia studies. The discussion concludes with questions about learning and writing as counter-expressions.