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The Well, a Cincinnati-based, national nonprofit, is offering its seventh year of Mindful Poetry Moments, offering poetry and meditation to youth and adults in schools, social service organizations and in weekly virtual gatherings for free during April in celebration of National Poetry Month 2026. Mindful Poetry Moments was incubated with the national On Being Project in 2019.
Each week in April, participants of all ages receive recordings of creative listening prompts and poems curated around this year’s theme of This Common Home: poems that explore our relationship with the natural world. The four poems selected for this year have been chosen from 24th US Poet Laureate Ada Limón’s You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World anthology.
This year’s curator is chaplain, journalist, and educator Eddie Gonzalez.
According to Gonzalez, these poems show how care — care for ourselves, one another, and the earth — is a practice we can return to again and again.
Selections for this year’s Mindful Poetry Moments include poetry by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ashley M. Jones, Analicia Sotelo, and Jake Skeets, with each week including 5 days of audio and video resources and worksheets that combine mindful prompts to respond and write poetry to alongside meaning-making questions for students and individuals to contemplate. Each week’s content features commissioned illustrations by artist Lyric Morris Latchaw. All of this year’s Mindful Poetry Moments content is available for free.
In addition to providing Mindful Poetry Moments content in audio and video resources, The Well will host several weekly poetry gatherings for poets and poetry lovers of all ages to listen, contemplate, and respond in writing to each featured poem. The Well will be offering free virtual poetry workshops, hosted on Zoom from 3:00 to 4:00pm every Wednesday throughout April. Each Gathering has a simple format for regular Mindful Poetry Moments participants and newcomers to enjoy. Each meeting begins with a meditation led by a mindfulness facilitator, then a reading of a poem selected by this year’s curator, after which guests are prompted by facilitators to write poetry and share with the group. For this year’s Virtual Gatherings (weekly on Wednesdays during April), The Well will be featuring a variety of poets and educators as facilitators for these sessions: Rebecca Lindenberg, Jaye Elizabeth Elijiah, Makiah Malan, Michael Yellowbird, and — as a special guest for the first session of the month on April 1st — Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama of Poetry Unbound.
The Well will also host in-person poetry gatherings (weekly on Thursdays during April) for Cincinnati-based Young Professionals at the organization’s Walnut Hills location, featuring several Cincinnati-based poets, artists, and educators, including Michael Thompson, Desirae "The Silent Poet" Hosley, and more.
The poems generated during these sessions can then be submitted for publication in The Well’s Mindful Poetry Moments anthology. For those unable to attend these gatherings but still want to write, The Well also posts recordings of each session on YouTube to ensure everyone has access to the meditation and prompt. The Well will also be hosting a virtual writing workshop at the end of the month for those who want a space to edit their work before submitting to the publication.
After all the poetry is collected, in the summer, The Well will host a book launch and poetry reading of the 7th anthology in its Walnut Hills location, where participants will be able to read their newly-published poetry to one another and to virtual participants.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, February 27th 2026
Contact: Patrick Raneses
Program & Event Manager, The Well
patrick@thewell.world
513-748-9694
For Access to Media Folder, please contact us.
Illustrations done by Lyric Morris Latchaw this year!
Pádraig Ó Tuama facilitating for our April 1st Mindful Poetry Virtual Gathering
The poems in this year’s Mindful Poetry Moments turn their attention to our relationship with the natural world. They are poems of beauty, honesty, and care that invite us to reconnect with nature as a place of profound belonging, intelligence, and kinship—a shared home for humans and the more-than-human alike. These poems remind us that we are deeply intertwined with the natural world, not separate from it, and that care—for ourselves, one another, and the earth—is a practice we can return to again and again. Expansive enough to hold the depth and variety of human emotions, they ask us to slow down, listen closely, and notice what stirs in us when we give our attention to the world around us. In doing so, they encourage us to approach life with tenderness, curiosity, and reverence, imagining together how we might live more attentively and lovingly within it.
Eddie Gonzalez, MPM 2026 Curator
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Our programs have been nourishing the community since 2005. In 2019, we became the non-profit, A Mindful Moment.
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