Karlene Forbs has attended the Creative Writing Workshop, as well as Alliance’s Food and Nutrition and Women’s Services groups, for almost two decades. She says what’s great about the group is that “you don’t have to be an experienced writer to write—just use whatever comes to mind and inspires you.”
Azeem told Metro that the group allowed him to “have a conversation” with his past instead of an argument. “When you suffer trauma, it plays in your head, and it’s like you start to argue in your own mind. With poetry, I got to put it on paper, see these words, understand these words, and connect with other people in the group. I think that’s very important.”
After 16 years of leading the group, Gerry moved away from New York City, and Alliance arranged for longtime members Rosa and Azeem to take the helm as the group’s facilitators. A special Poetry Leader training had already been offered for years, enabling other participants to run the group in Gerry’s absence, in keeping with Alliance’s commitment to building peer-based leadership capacity among our participants.
When Gerry left, Rosa and Azeem were more than ready to take on full responsibility for all the group’s logistics, including curating poems for Situations. “When Gerry worked with us, she was so knowledgeable and I would just soak it up like a sponge,” said Rosa. “When I took over, I had to really learn about poets, and metaphors, and different rhythms to coach people up like she did.”
“Alliance’s Executive Director and CEO Sharen Duke was well aware of how art and creativity connect to healing and well-being,” said Gerry, “Sharen was strongly committed to offering creative programming as part of Alliance’s comprehensive, whole-person approach, and really made it possible for this amazing, long-term creative phenomenon to happen.”
Twenty-three years later, the Creative Writing Workshop is an enduring testimony to the power of poetry and creative expression as a tool for healing and growth. It is a sustained community with an enormous body of literary work behind it—including one former participant, Iris Elizabeth Sankey-Lewis, who has written more than 5,000 haiku, a short-form Japanese style of poetic expression she learned about and fell in love with during her many years in the group.
“I am always so inspired by the poets in the Creative Writing group. The act of writing and expressing your emotions takes courage,” said Ramona Cummings, Alliance’s Chief Program Officer and Liaison to the Creative Writing Workshop. “Each poem is testament to their commitment to healing and overcoming life’s situations. I’m so grateful to be part of an organization that understands that healing, recovering, and overcoming can be accomplished through platforms such as creative writing.”
The group has yielded some unexpected benefits as well. Some poets have told us that the group helped them improve their English language and reading skills, develop presentation skills that supported their efforts to gain employment, and increase their confidence with public speaking.
“Creative writing was a safe place for me when I was dealing with homelessness, domestic violence, and later, with my HIV diagnosis,” said Ashley Johnson, an Alliance staff member who joined the workshop in 2007. “Seeing my poems published and reading them in Barnes & Noble, I felt accomplished. It boosted my self-esteem and started the process of me wanting to change my situation—the change I deserved.”
