This March through June, She's the First is giving you a fun opportunity to send more girls to school. It's as simple as asking friends and family to support you in a race, or organizing your own fitness fundraiser, from yoga to spinning classes. Sign up your event on our Causevox page and help us sponsor 100 girls in 100 days!
Do you want to make a difference on your home campus? Join the 30+ campus chapters across the country and inspire your middle school, high school, or university to empower and educate girls in the developing world!
“As writers, we’re celebrating National Poetry Month by crafting a poem or two, but we’re also excited to check out If the World Were My Classroom…, a new poetry anthology published by She’s the First, a nonprofit that raises money for girls’ education in developing countries.
She’s the First asked “If the world were my classroom, I’d teach a girl…”, and more than 8,000 first-time writers and seasoned professionals from around the world submitted their inspirational responses. The poems selected aim to “express the evolving wisdom, brave vulnerability, and bold ambition that we universally share with girls worldwide, despite the vastly different circumstances into which we are born.”
Pick up a copy at She’s the First or swing by our Twitter giveaway on Wednesday at 12 PT for a chance to win your own copy. Tweet a response to the prompt “If the world were my classroom, I’d teach a girl…” and the best verses will be compiled into a poem and three winners will be randomly selected to win an autographed copy of the anthology!
We hope you’re able to express yourself this month and maybe even help other women do the same!”
Yesterday was the big She’s the First Voice Your Verse Event!!! It was an exciting and inspiring night. Watch it live here!
On April 7, She’s the First*{Bryn Mawr College} hosted a poetry open mic night fundraiser to support the Voice Your Verse campaign! Students read their own original poems as well as poems published in the “If the World Were My Classroom” anthology, which donates 100% of proceeds to girls’ sponsorships (learn more at http://www.shesthefirst.org/anthology).
Lakshmi Somasundaram chose to read a poem in the anthology that was written by Vinceya Xavier Edwin, an 11th grader at Shanti Bhavan Children’s School in Tamil Nadu, India — the same region Lakshmi’s parents are from. To learn more about our partner school in India, where you can contribute to a girl’s sponsorship, visit http://www.shesthefirst.org/2011/03/shanti-bhavan-childrens-project.
Join the Voice Your Verse campaign and help us make a global impact during National Poetry Month!
(via everything-inspiring)
She’s the First’s #VoiceYourVerse Poetry Campaign is all about poetry. Poetry is about life, so National Poetry Month is really a celebration of life!
The Surprise
by Lola Haskins
St. Augustine
Light shafts down on
the assembled congregation of sails
billows my shirt sends me to where thin countries
stretch like needles to a low and distant shore
from which suddenly canoes appear
(via emilyannerigal)
Song After Sadness
by Katie Ford
Despair is still servant
to the violet and wild ongoings
of bone. You, remember, are
that which must be made
servant only to salt, only
to the watery acre that is the body
of the beloved, only to the child
leaning forward into
the exhibit of birches
the forest has made of bronze light
and snow. Even as the day kneels
forward, the oceans and strung garnets, too,
kneel, they are all kneeling,
the city, the goat, the lime tree
and mother, the fearful doctor,
kneeling. Don’t say it’s the beautiful
I praise. I praise the human,
gutted and rising.
At the Blue Note
by Pablo Medina
for Karen Bentivenga
Sometimes in the heat of the snow
you want to cry out
for pleasure or pain like a bell.
And you wind up holding each other,
listening to the in-between
despite the abyss at the edge of the table.
Hell. Mulgrew Miller plays like a big
bad spider, hands on fire, the piano
trembling like crystal,
the taste and smell of a forest under water.
The bartender made us a drink
with butterfly wings and electric wire.
Bitter cold outside, big silence,
a whale growing inside us.
Coach Losing His Daughter
by Jack Ridl
She stares at his players
who turn him into aging wood,
make him sexless as his little finger.
When he tries to talk to her,
his sentences dissolve, the nouns
and verbs all floating mute
into the sky’s blue ear.
He knows why his players
lift and curl. He sees them
tightening their belts. Bodies
that well built should build
a house, knock a bully
on his can. But after practice,
Coach can only see his daughter
getting in their cars, feel
their muscles sweating on her skin.
