Abstract
This chapter explores a creative writing poem that places community-based poet-mentor educators into low-income middle and high school classrooms to devise curricula that excavates student experiences as a basis for learning. Building upon research on multiple literacies, my findings demonstrate that learning is a social practice, situated in the lives of students. To unearth young people’s capabilities, homegrown experts from the neighborhood shifted the classroom culture and opened the space up for courageous vulnerability and soul-stirring spoken word performance poetry. Throughout this process, young people and the teachers in this study came to use writing as an educational and emancipatory tool for reading the word, the world, and themselves anew. This form of social justice instruction turned nouns, like hope, into verbs for marginalized youth in the inner-city.