Reflections on Mindful Poetry Moments 2026

Less is more, but often, too, abundance can be just as nourishing. This is the most robust year Mindful Poetry Moments has had in its history as a program at The Well. The additional funding from The Millstone Fund, Find Your Light Foundation, and Artswave Young Professionals Grant Fund was such a boon to Mindful Poetry, allowing the program to go deeper and wider than it ever has before. This year, quantity became quality: being able to increase the number of sessions we shared with our local and wider community allowed us to share more insight with the variety of poems we explored with students and poetry-lovers throughout the spring, and consequently see some profound results from the poetry written by students and adults: our ability to return to our participants deepens their relationship with our programming and the poetry within it alongside our relationship to them.

Our local sessions with students were deepened by being able to return to students again and again. We met many of the Northern Kentucky students who attended our poetry workshop at NKU’s Dreamfest conference for middle-school students in March again later in April at Sharp Middle School in Butler, Kentucky. During this April session at Sharp Middle School, we were able to get at the heart of this year’s Mindful Poetry theme This Common Home and explore and appreciate nature during our Nature Walk and Poetry Workshop we hosted with their sixth grade classroom. Inspired by Ashley M. Jones’s “Lullaby for the Grieving,” we hiked with students through Sharp Middle School’s nature trail. Students were prompted to be aware of their five senses and record their impressions of nature as we completed the trail, after which students wrote their own poetry outdoors using those impressions and feelings of comfort from being outside in their own work. Students who had already experienced a Mindful Poetry Moment earlier in the spring and who had already been exposed to our nature theme felt more at ease writing poetry with us and were able to approach and appreciate the subject of nature. Bryn Jenkins explores in her poem “Algae forming” her appreciation of nature as a muse to herself and to her fellow students:

Our ability to return again and again to our participants deepened their experience with the program and with our organization as a whole. We continued to host our all-ages Gatherings in April, this year doubling the amount and hosting half of them in-person at The Well. Many of our all-ages participants are practicing poets and writers themselves who appreciate the ability to freely write and express themselves outside of a traditional writing workshop environment via our In-Person and Virtual Poetry Gatherings where we meditate, read and discuss a poem, and then write and share our own work with each other. Alexandra McIntosh, a local Northern Kentucky poet and educator who was introduced to our programming during our last Poetry Book Launch, attended all of our in-person Gatherings and several of our Virtual Gatherings, becoming a thoughtful and important contributor to our poetry discussions and when providing feedback to others. Alexandra enjoyed her time so much during these sessions that she reached out to The Well afterward National Poetry Month ended, interested in continuing our in-person Poetry Gatherings into the fall. She is now serving as our Poetry Facilitator for our upcoming Fall In-Person Poetry Gatherings during which she will be taking the lead in bringing discussion and insight to other poetry lovers like her. She contributed to the book with her poem “Altamont,” a beautiful reflection on the passage of time’s effect on our family and the spaces that they belong to alongside the objects within that belong to them:

Finally, not only were we able to introduce so many new students and individuals to our program this year with our increased number of sessions, but we were also able to engage more deeply with schools and individuals who have been with us for years. Magnolia Elementary in Seattle, WA has been a Mindful Poetry Moment participant for the last few years, with their students writing and submitting prolific numbers of poems every year to our anthology. This year, we were able to host two Virtual Poetry Workshops with two of their fourth grade classrooms. Even though we were only able to interact with these two classrooms via Zoom, it was such a wonderful experience for The Well to interact with the bright students in Julie Colando and Mandy Underhill’s classrooms. One student in Julie Colando’s class, Lucy Mao, submitted her poem "Darkness and Light" in 2025, which we highlighted in the epilogue of our book. We learned that Lucy's father passed of cancer around two years prior to her submission that year, but despite the numerous difficulties of such an experience, her poem was an incredible instance of Lucy's capacity — and the capacity of poetry as a whole — to allow light into our lives. Mrs. Colando made sure Lucy, now in 5th grade, was able to attend the virtual workshop to work on poetry with us. Like many of these students we have worked with across our programming who experience dysregulation, instability in their family lives, and all of the challenges that youth experience in the 21st century, her participation and, importantly, her continued desire to explore poetry, mindfulness, and how those two important pillars of this program fit into her life exhibits an incredible resilience and hope that we are only fortunate enough to see when we get to see these students more than once. Her submission, “Apophis,” explores the ability life, love, hope, and home in the face of chaos: 

PDF of "Apophis" by Lucy Mao