In a time of incredible isolation, LGBTQ+ students are cooped up in homes that may or may not allow them to be their authentic selves. They may be dealing with teachers and learning management systems that cannot get their names or pronouns right. They may have peers who find ways to bully them online. What are educators doing to create online spaces that welcome and normalize LGBTQ+ lives? In this workshop, we will queer the curriculum in order to show all Youth that being LGBTQ+ is normal.

Through poetry, we invite our students’ lives — the “landscape and bread” of their homes, their ancestors, their struggles and joys — into classrooms as subjects worthy of study. While students learn the language of the academy about stanzas and line breaks, similes and metaphors, they must first learn that poetry can be playful, that it can use ordinary, everyday language, and sound like their grandma or their aunts laughing together on the front porch, that it can be written in house slippers. In this poetry workshop, participants will reclaim any part of our lives that society has degraded, humiliated, or shamed, and raise it up, share it, and sing praises to the “unanimous blood/of those who struggle,” as the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton urged us in his poem “Like You.”