Three Ph.D. students from the UH College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences’ Department of Hispanic Studies led a poetry workshop at Bellaire High School on August 31, 2026.
Gerardo Cardenas, Andrea Cuevas and Soe Sanchez Monje led the session, which introduced the high schoolers to creative techniques, rhetoric and rhyme structures, and niche poetry forms. It was an opportunity for the high school students to use poetry to share their thoughts and feelings artistically.
"With all the news and all the tragedies that are happening, we wanted to give them a space where they can be heard," said Elias David Navarro, assistant program director and general coordinator for the Spanish Creative Writing Program and professor of Hispanics Studies.
Bringing experienced writers and researchers from the department into the classroom
not only helped the high school students develop their creative literary skills, it
also allowed the UH students to build meaningful connections with the community.
"I want to tell you something about poetry! Poetry has no rules, no boundaries, it
is a way to express ourselves,” Andrea Cuevas, who helped lead the workshop, told
the students.
Gerardo Cardenas, another UH Ph.D. candidate, introduced the high schoolers to creative methods like the “Exquisite Corpse” technique, originally created by Surrealists during the early 20th century.
"[It] is a form of poetry where people start writing individual lines, and then they pass them around to someone who puts together a poem from lines that apparently make no sense. Because they are not connected, you don't know what the other person is writing, and then you put them up, and it's a poem," he explained.
The high school students wrote how they felt on a whiteboard, using those thoughts to build the collaborative piece.
"At the end we read the poem together, and they were like ‘Yay! Oh My God, I can't believe that is a poem.’ So, it was really refreshing to share with these young poets and writers," said Cuevas, who noted how quickly the high schoolers gained confidence in their own abilities in creating poetry works.
The workshop served to empower youth, particularly within the Hispanic community, to use poetry as an outlet for self-expression, and was the first of three outreach activities Navarro and his students have planned.
It was also a preview of next month’s Jornada de Poesia, a poetry festival that will
be held on the UH campus. Its theme is “In Houston, in this moment, what else could
we talk about?”
The festival takes place on October 16.