This writer’s job: Get young people to see poetry everywhere

The world according to Naomi Shihab Nye is all about the quiet moments, all about the small details. Like the small cut on her arm.

The sleeves of her green plaid shirt are rolled up her forearms, revealing the cut, as she speaks to a group of teachers at Humanities Texas – her voice deep and raspy from decades of speaking in classrooms.

It’s mid-June and she’s been away from Texas for a few days. Socks, her cat, did not like it, so when she returned “a little cat love” was waiting for her. She’s driven up from San Antonio with her mother to speak to the teachers. Her thick gray-brown hair is tied into a big ponytail bundled over her left shoulder, making space for her wide brown eyes.

Children and young people “need more exposure to poetry,” she says, not just for when they’re children, but for when they’re not. “How does poetry help us live our lives?” she asks. “How can it help us? How can it serve us?”

She has made a career writing about small things that can so often go unnoticed. In one poem…

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