During the 2025-26 school year, the poets in schools program Students at the Heart completed 20 residencies in 7 school districts. During each residency, a teaching poet works with 4 or 5 teachers, often across grade levels, to complete 20 hours of teaching time with the students in their classes. This year, the teaching poets worked with 72 teachers over the course of the school year, and visited 91 classrooms. That’s over 1,800 students who got to work with a professional teaching poet this year alone!
Over the course of the week-long residencies, teaching poets share poems, invite students to explore their voice and develop their own response to the world around them. Students wrote poems about chickens and dinosaurs, foods and places that remind them of home, time spent in nature, and moments of joy, loss, and rage. The ability for these young voices to express themselves, process emotions, be vulnerable, funny, and honest jumps off the page.
We thank the amazing teaching poets who enter these schools and make connections with students that will last a lifetime. We thank the dedicated teachers who welcome the poets into their classrooms, the school district coordinators who reach out and organize the interested teachers, and our hosts who volunteer to house poets traveling from out of town. We are forever grateful for funding from Anacortes Schools Foundation, Mount Vernon Public Schools Foundation, Washington Elementary Parent Teacher Group, Big Lake Parent Group, individual donors, WECU and Motorsports, Soroptimist and La Conner Rotary, and the hard working board of the Skagit River Poetry Foundation who continue to make these residencies a reality despite shrinking budgets for the arts. Thank you for making this experience available to all our children!
Meet our teaching poets!
The History
We began in 1998 as the Skagit River Poetry Project, after a conversation between leaders from seven rural school districts in Skagit County, Washington. These leaders hoped to create a project that would support our high literacy standards with the arts. Poetry was a natural vehicle.
From 1998 to the present, more than 50 Skagit, Island, and Whatcom County teachers annually have hosted resident poets. More than 10,000 local students have had the experience of playing with words while reading and writing poetry one-on-one with experts.
The culminating event for this in-class work is the biennial Skagit River Poetry Festival, held every other year. From 2000 to the present, the Foundation Board has invited a multi-cultural combination of Northwest, national and international poets to participate in readings, workshops, and panels for our four-day event in the historic town of La Conner, Washington.