HAND TO HAND, HEART TO HEART PROJECT
In 2004 the Interfaith Youth Poetry Project reached out to the global community in our first international collaboration. The project was titled Hand to Hand, Heart to Heart, because we believe that poetry can reach around the world and establish strong bonds between people. Through this project we received poems from students around the world and have published a small book of selected samples of their work. This book is available for purchase.
The project received over 500 poems from about 60 different countries, including Peru, Bolivia, France, Kuwait, Ethiopia, Estonia, Macedonia, Slovakia, Israel, Palestine, Zambia, the Maldives,and Mauritius. One teacher wrote with poems from her 7th and 8th grade class in Pakistan while they were confined to campus due to a terrorist attack at the school two years prior.
We hope to promote an international network of students, teachers and schools who can participate, whether or not they have had much prior experience with writing poetry. This network of participants will be a base for further international arts projects. In addition to other contacts, IYPP director, Cathy Cohen, is collaborating with Dr. Dahlia Lorenz, who is supervising educational counseling students attending Haifa University (Haifa, Israel) and the Israeli branch of Derby University (Tel Aviv, Israel).
While providing a sample of writing across boundaries of nationality, culture, religion and ethnicity, we also want to show children's universal concerns, as expressed through their poetry: their hopes, dreams, fears, and ways of coping with life's uncertainties (including violence and world conflict).
We believe that everyone can write poems in a natural way! The act of writing and sharing their poems will help students gain self-confidence by expressing feelings and thoughts about life’s joys and difficulties. They will build acceptance and awareness of others, while developing their own self-acceptance, self-knowledge, and inner strength.
We continue to receive poetry submissions from all over the world, some of which are published in our annual Journal of the Interfaith Youth Poetry Project. If you would like to order an IYPP journal, please see our list of journals for sale. If you are interested in submitting your poetry, please mail your poem, along with our Publishing Release Form, to the address indicated on the Form.
Check out the Hand to Hand, Heart to Heart poetry exercise!
Dahlia Lorenz, Ph.D., is the founder and researcher of the “flower model” of creative poetry therapy for groups in multi-cultural settings. She has lead and taught about poetry therapy groups for many years, and has been involved with psychology counseling in education. She believes in the magic of natural poetry writing as part of the school curriculum as a vehicle to promote well-being, that is, more acceptance and self-confidence, less violence, and more motivation for learning. Dahlia’s book, "Mishelly" Creative Poetry Therapy (2000), and articles demonstrate the benefit of creative poetry writing to the well-being of the writers. She received the highest award from the Israel Counseling Association (2001) for leading educational counseling in Israel. Currently she teaches Poetry Therapy at Haifa University and Derby University and Tel Aviv to students, who, in turn, work with children in different Arabic and Jewish schools. She works with Jews and Arabs in mixed groups.
Copyright 2007 Arts & Spirituality Center. All rights reserved.