Established in 1986, The Care Center in Holyoke, MA, provides alternative-education for pregnant and parenting teens. Its young women, many of them Spanish-speakers, earn their high-school equivalency diplomas, with the support of on-site day care, parenting training, job placement, personal and career counseling, arts programming and athletics. We’ve facilitated visits to Tzivia Gover’s poetry class by a string of poets in our series, including Demetria Martinez, Joy Harjo, and Nikky Finney; and Ellen Watson spent a lively session discussing translation with the student group editing the Care Center’s bilingual literary journal, Nautilus II. It has been thrilling to see poem-talk spill out onto the Holyoke sidewalks!

"Having poets from the Poetry Center’s reading series visit our students makes poetry leap off the page and come to life for young women who have had little access to literature.

The connections, the inspiration, and the newfound hunger for poetry have been both life-affirming and life-enhancing. "
– Tzivia Gover, Writing Specialist, The Care Center