From 2024-2025, as Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, Tess Taylor worked with over 500 local students to explore poetry as a tool for resilience, joy, and collective voice. In this reflection, she shares stories from classrooms and community events where young poets wrote about pickles, bug corpses, and backpacks of infinityspace, while also learning to listen to one another and themselves. Faced with disappearing arts funding and widening inequities, Tess makes a powerful case for why poetry — and public art more broadly — is essential to civic health. This is a celebration of wild imaginations, handmade anthologies, and the radical act of tending each other’s stories.
“Maybe we’ll invest in one another’s gardens, not in a few people’s chainsaws.”
