The city of West Hollywood is getting the word out about a Youth Poetry Workshop opportunity for local youth ages 7-18. Distanced, Together: Youth Voices of West Hollywood in Quarantine, will be organized by West Hollywood City Poet Laureate Brian Sonia-Wallace in conjunction with the nonprofit organization Get Lit-Words Ignite.

Distanced, Together will include storytelling and poetry writing workshops and public events to empower local youth to record and share their experiences through public speaking and self-expression.

Distanced, Together programming will run from March through December and will include up to 10 unique opportunities for a virtual workshop of up to one hour (scheduling flexible) writing gratitude poems based on Sonia-Wallace’s West Hollywood holiday poem, “After the Music.” The poem was developed into an animated video by West Hollywood’s Arts Division and is available for viewing at youtu.be/IVwN5HflB3c.

Poems will be included in a “Youth Voices of West Hollywood in Quarantine” anthology, and students will have the opportunity to perform their original work and invite family at a virtual event at the end of the school year.

As local students return to school on Zoom, this workshop opportunity promises to help them notice what they appreciate and enjoy in this context while developing vital creative writing and self-expression skills. The free workshop can support an English class (working on critical reading and creative writing) or any other class or school function. A total of up to 10 free Distanced, Together workshops will be made available. For information or to schedule a workshop, an adult parent, guardian or teacher may contact Sonia-Wallace to begin the process at brian@getlit.org.

The project is a collaboration with Get Lit-Words Ignite, a nonprofit organization that fuses classic and spoken word poetry to increase teen literacy on the page and in visual media. It cultivates enthusiastic learners emboldened to inspire social consciousness in diverse communities. For information, visit getlit.org.

Distanced, Together is made possible with the support of a $5,000 Humanities for All program grant from California Humanities, which supports public humanities projects that provide responsive and creative methods to deliver programming to community members when traditional in-person programming is not possible due to the coronavirus pandemic. For information, visit calhum.org/programs-initiatives/programs/humanities-for-all.

For information, visit weho.org/arts or contact Michael Che, West Hollywood’s arts coordinator, at (323)848-6377 or at mche@weho.org.