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Young Poets Will Read Their Works At Special Dinner
By Alicia Doyle
Ventura County Star, April 27, 2010

To celebrate National Poetry Month and the recent publication of an anthology of poems by Ventura County children called “They Speak the Names of the Mysterious Rainbow,” local elementary and middle school students will read their work during a dinner to benefit California Poets in the Schools/ArtsLIVE.

Hosted by the Sylvia White Gallery in Ventura, the event on Friday will showcase poems in the anthology that were written during workshops this year conducted by the Ventura County chapter of California Poets in the Schools, a community-based poetry education program serving youth since 1964.

“It is the culmination of a series of poetry-writing workshops, wherein students learned the basic poetic qualities for writing poems and wrote their own original poetry,” explained Shelley Savren, Ventura County area coordinator for California Poets in the Schools and administrator of the ArtsLIVE grant.

The anthology features the work of 50 students — ages 6 to 13 — from 10 classrooms in Oxnard, Ventura, Santa Paula, Fillmore, Newbury Park and Thousand Oaks. The event also serves as a fundraiser for the CPITS program.

“We are preparing a gourmet dinner and charging a small fee to attend,” Savren said. “We are hoping to gain more visibility as a program by having this event.”

ArtsLIVE, a project of the Ventura County Community Foundation, is funded by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation Communities for Advancing the Arts, Savren said.

The grant enables California Poets in the Schools to hold workshops, recruit and train new poets, produce an anthology and raise funds for future programs, she said. “The mission of CPITS is to help students throughout California recognize and celebrate their own creativity, intuition and intellectual curiosity through the creative writing process, and to provide students with a multicultural community of trained, published poets who bring their experience and love for their craft into the classroom.”

The funds raised Friday will be used as seed money for future workshops in schools throughout Ventura County, Savren said.

In a climate where No Child Left Behind puts an emphasis on testing, and the arts are often the first subjects to be omitted from schools, poetry isn’t high on the priority list.

Savren said, however, that “students learn to write, speak, listen and respond critically to other student’s poems; these workshops have actually helped students raise their test scores. We all know that there is a funding crisis and yet, there are principals out there who realize the importance of writing and self-expression. We want those principals to know about our program. This will be a great showcase in that regard.”

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