Too often our local histories are obscured by white supremacist narratives that benefit the privileged and erode equity. Through a student-led, student-centered curriculum, STL Youth DocPoets will invite Saint Louis Public Schools students to map their experiences onto the larger palimpsest of their city’s history. Through creative writing workshops, archival research, printmaking, performance, and publishing, students across the school district will collaborate to reclaim, recycle, and regenerate histories in interactive ways for the wider public.
Lizzy Petersen is a poet from St. Louis, MO, where she has led creative writing programs for young people for six years, most recently, OutsideLitMag.com, the student-run magazine publishing high schoolers in Saint Louis Public Schools alongside fellow teaching artists Sarah Tisdale, Valeria Monroy, and Britny Cordera. Her poetry and community practice merge histories and poetics through erasure, persona, ekphrasis, and publishing. Her recent work can be found in Image, Ninth Letter, and Southern Humanities Review. She has served as Managing Editor for River Styx and Poetry Editor for Sycamore Review at Purdue University, where she received her MFA.
Sarah Tisdale is a Black and Queer poet and teaching artist from St. Louis, working most recently through a teaching residency at Saint Louis Poetry Center. Sarah has been teaching for over a decade and has received training through Center for Creative Art’s Institute for Arts Integration, the Center for Art of Translation’s Poetry Inside Out teacher workshop, and the Regional Arts Commission’s Community Art Training Institute. She has attended Winter Tangerine’s Writers Workshop at Poets House, Tin House Summer Workshop, Pink Door Writing Retreat, and has been accepted to the Sundress Academy for the Arts residency for 2021.
Britny Cordera is a published poet, nonfiction writer, and emerging journalist who investigates the intersections between environment, climate change, religion, and ecowomanism. She is interested in how climate change continues to exacerbate the settler-colonial agenda and how it is affecting Black and Indigenous communities. Cordera was a finalist for the 2020 Narrative 30 Below contest. Her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Rhino, Narrative, Xavier Review, and PANK. She received her MFA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. When she is not reporting for FBO, or writing poetry, Cordera teaches for St. Louis Poetry Center and roller skates in her free time.