In April, Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop assumed programming duties for The Beat Within writing workshop at New Beginnings Youth Development Center, DC’s Juvenile Detention Facility. The Beat Within also publishes a weekly magazine of youth writing; Free Minds members have been regular contributors for years. Now, Free Minds is building on this longstanding partnership by co-facilitating weekly writing workshops with The Beat Within and DC Youth Slam Team.
We will be bringing our multi-level emphasis on the writing process into the Beat’s established workshop model. The weekly workshops will focus strongly on writing and encouraging the young poets to find their voice—to feel heard through their words and begin to trust that voice. But the most exciting part of these workshops will be their co-leaders: Free Minds Poet Ambassadors.
The Poet Ambassadors are Free Minds members who have come home and become active participants in community outreach. Many of them spent time in juvenile detention themselves before being incarcerated at the DC Jail. Now these young men will co-facilitate the writing workshop, sharing stories of their own journey through incarceration and the role that writing has played in their lives.
Delonte, a Poet Ambassador, spoke with passion in a recent session about his own introduction to writing. “I never wrote before I got locked up,” he said. “But with Free Minds, I started. Now I know that sometimes you have to write things into existence. Even now that I’m home, I use the things I wrote to keep me on track.”
Another Poet Ambassador, David, began going to New Beginnings (then called Oak Hill) when he was 13 years old. At 16, he was charged as an adult, and he returned home this January after seven years in adult prison, two in complete solitary confinement. Now 22, he says teaching at New Beginnings on Wednesdays is the best thing he does. “Going there makes me feel like I have value,” David says. “Prison almost broke me but reading and writing kept me alive. Now I know why: It’s to help young kids at New Beginnings.”