Write It!: 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire

by Jessica Jacobs, Nickole Brown

Overview

"Write It! might be one of the friendliest poetry tool kits/notebooks ever."
—Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People's Poet Laureate,

Discover your creative voice and learn to write poetry in this easy-to-use guided journal with 100 poetry prompts—a 2021 Young People's Poet Laureate Pick! 

Thoughtful, stimulating, and fun prompts developed from workshops by award-winning poets will help you craft writing that authentically expresses your inner life. Compose on these beautifully designed pages, and create a body of work that you can enjoy privately or share using decorative display pages perfect for social media.

This lovely guided journal can be both a canvas for exploration and a treasured keepsake showcasing your creative voice. Includes decorative pages and a ribbon with beautiful cloth hardbound cover.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781632173478
Publisher:	Blue Star Press
Publication date:	10/20/2020
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	6.25(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Jessica Jacobs is an award-winning poet and the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, and In Whatever Light Left to Us. Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, Fanny Says, and The Donkey Elegies. She once worked as editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. When not at home in Asheville, North Carolina, Jessica and Nickole are leading poetry workshops around the world.

Read an Excerpt

Simply put, this book is designed to get you writing,
to help you find your voice or, as the case may be,
your many voices, so that the stories within you might rise and make a chorus of your multitudes.

The title of this book—Write It!—is from Elizabeth
Bishop’s “One Art”—a poem the poet famously sculpted through a series of obsessive revisions from a set of messy notes into a stunning villanelle. In it, she begins with a list of the things she’s lost, starting small: keys, an hour here or there, her mother’s watch. But even when she allows herself to list lost items as big as a house, a river, or a continent, she knows she still hasn’t acknowledged the true loss that forced her to the page. No, it’s only in the final line of the final stanza that the poet admits
 she can tolerate the loss of all but her beloved and urges herself to be honest, to be vulnerable, finally,
 to “Write it!”, forcing herself to own the truth she didn’t yet have the courage to say. To read Bishop’s poem is to witness a person’s movement toward selfrevelation through writing, and we hope these prompts will engage you on a similar journey.
So, what do you need to get started? Well, only a pen, really. Or maybe a pencil, if you’re the erasing type. Oh, and it will help if you carve out a space for yourself in terms of both time and place. Fifteen minutes here, a half hour there—whatever your life allows—along with a quiet little corner in which to write.

Editorial Reviews

Write It! might be one of the friendliest poetry tool kits/notebooks ever. As the title suggests, the book is very direct. How do people write about feelings too difficult to face directly? Is listening to trees possible? Is that rain talking to me? How many names does any person really have? The editors—Jessica Jacobs and Nickole Brown, both fine poets themselves—make us feel lucky to sit at their table. Readers will learn about writers and quotations, multiple perspectives, possibilities, and tactics while feeling deeply befriended all the way. Who knows where you might go? I plan to write on every page.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye, Poetry Foundation's Young People’s Poet Laureate

“Write It! is an absolute pleasure, a gentle, encouraging guide for discovering the stories around and within us. Jacobs and Brown serve as fairy godpoets, bringing us the words and wisdom of beloved writers along with prompts to inspire and embolden. This book asks us to be curious and open, to find ourselves in the mirror and on the page. It shows us how to eavesdrop on the world and our own hearts.”
—Janet McNally, The Looking Glass

“These soul-searching prompts inspire conversations with oneself, our world, and poets who have come before us. As a teacher and author, I’m equally excited about sharing this book with my students and diving in myself!”
—Nicole Kronzer, Unscripted

“Jessica Jacobs and Nickole Brown are two poets of presence, passion, and purpose. I am constantly learning from their brilliant poems and how they both inhabit the natural world around with them with immense light and graceful precision. This book of beautiful writing prompts is a safe space to explore the depths of your imagination, overflowing with favorite lines from beloved writers and soul-stirring questions. Write It! will help you deepen your writing practice as well as your relationship to identity, place, and community. Sometimes there is nothing more terrifying than a blank page or blinking cursor. Sometimes you need the right nudge and spark, these one hundred prompts are lit matches waiting for you”
—Tiana Clark, I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood

From the Publisher