Stories of Arrival: Refugee & Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project
Founded by Merna in 2009, the Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry project takes place at Foster High School in Tukwila, WA, one of the most language and culturally diverse high schools in the U.S. Foster High School ELL teacher Carrie Stradley co-directs the project with Merna. The project takes place in Carrie’s classroom. From the outset, the project has been affiliated with the Institute for Poetic Medicine (IPM) as an IPM Poetry Partner Project as well as a longstanding partnership with Seattle’s Jack Straw Cultural Center. Many of the students in the project have migrated from their home countries due to war, violence, poverty, lack of education and health care, climate disruptions, and other untenable situations that have affected their own and their families’ safety and survival. A number of them have lived in refugee camps before arriving in the U.S. Merna’s innovative approach to teaching provides safe space for the students to tell the deeply personal and often harrowing stories that honor their migration journeys and give witness to their courage and resilience. The young people in the project have come to poetry learning to articulate their own sense of longing, grief and hope as it connects to both the experience of living through heartbreaking conflicts and to their dreams of how they want to contribute to creating peaceful solutions to violent conflicts and the effects of poverty, climate disruption and discrimination. Through their creative writing they have envisioned a more peaceful, humane and sustainable world which is a tribute both to them and to the power of poetry.
The years of collaboration with Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle have given the young poets an opportunity to record their poetry in a state of the art studio, a highlight for them during the project. Each year the students have also received printed, bound anthologies of their poetry and Merna and Carrie have held community wide anthology release celebrations.
Stories of Arrival in Collaboration with Project Feast
As the project has grown, so too Merna’s commitment to nourishing community partnerships. In 2015 Merna established an intergenerational collaboration with Project Feast, an organization that serves refugee women that was located at the Tukwila Community Center and is now in Kent. The Project Feast mission is to “transform the lives of refugees and immigrants by providing pathways to sustainable employment in the local food industry and to enrich communities through exploring ethnic culture and cuisine.” The anthology that resulted from this collaboration brims with memories of homeland gardens, watercolors of fruits and vegetables, treasured family and community recipes, and interviews with the Project Feast cooks conducted by the students. The poetry connects food to place, family, culture and memory. The poems also address themes of food scarcity and survival. The anthology is titled Our Table of Memories: Food and Poetry of Spirit, Homeland and Tradition
Stories of Arrival in collaboration with the IRC New Roots Program at the Namaste Garden.
The International Rescue Committee, (IRC), Namaste Garden is located directly behind Foster High School. The garden is an IRC New Roots Program for refugee gardeners which also has a focus on youth programs that support learning about food systems and sustainability from a social justice perspective. During this collaborative project the students had the opportunity for working and learning in the Namaste Garden. The question of “How should we care for the earth and each other?” was at the heart of the 2017 poetry project from which the anthology, Holding the Earth Together: Youth Voices Speak for Our World was created.
The Stories of Arrival project has been featured on national and local NPR radio programs; on KBCS Radio; in the Seattle Times and other local and regional newspapers; as part of the King County 4 Culture Poetry on the Buses contest with eight winners; on numerous blogs, websites, and in curriculum guides; in national magazines and journals including the Teachers and Writers Collaborative Magazine and Skipping Stones an award winning Multicultural Magazine for Young People; on the Global Law Associates Immigration Law blog; and it was spotlighted on the Academy of American Poets written and audio blog.
Stories of Arrival: Refugee and Immigrant Youth Voices Poetry Project is fiscally sponsored by Shunpike. Shunpike is the 501(c)(3) non-profit agency that provides independent arts groups in Washington State with the services, resources, and opportunities they need to forge their own paths to sustainable success.