In 2010, Poetry In Voice created a recitation contest for senior high school students. Since then, we’ve developed the best online resources for teaching poetry in grades 6 through 12. Like thousands of other teachers across Canada, you’ll find exactly what you need here to get your students fired up about reading, reciting, and writing poetry.
Lesson Plans
New ideas for your next poetry class
Poet In Class
Bring a poet into your classroom - for free!
Jason Stefanik
Winnipeg, MB
Jason Stefanik is a second-generation adoptee raised in Manitoba’s Interlake. He currently resides in Winnipeg’s North End. He is a founding member of neither/neither, a creative collective at the Edge Gallery in Winnipeg’s inner city, and also facilitated a small poetry workshop for inmates at Stony Mountain Penitentiary. His poems have appeared in tart, Misunderstandings Magazine, Grain, Nashwaak Review, Arc, and Prairie Fire. He is the recipient of the 2015 Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award and his book of poetry, Night Became Years, was shortlisted for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award. He's currently writing a sequence of poems on cryptography and often asks himself, "What would Auden do?"
Madhur Anand
Guelph, ON
An ecology professor at the University of Guelph, Madhur Anand co-edited the anthology Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry. Her debut collection of poems, published in 2015, is A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes. Her debut experimental memoir, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart won the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award. Her second collection of poems, Parasitic Oscillations, was published in 2022.
Sarah Tolmie
Kitchener, ON
Sarah Tolmie has loved early English since she was a teenager because of its weirdness. She did degrees in medieval studies at Toronto and Cambridge. She always wrote poetry but began to write speculative fiction — Ursula Le Guin was a mentor — in her 30s after her kids were born and now has published nine books of it, novels, novellas and short fiction. She is a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Waterloo. McGill-Queen’s University Press has published three of her poetry collections: Trio (a long book of sonnets that tells a love story) in 2015, The Art of Dying in 2018 (nominated for the Griffin Prize) and Check in October, 2020.
Kayla Geitzler
Moncton, NB
Kayla Geitzler is from Moncton, New Brunswick, which is within Siknikt of the Mi'kma'ki, the unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq People. Named “A Rad Woman of Canadian Poetry”, Kayla was Moncton’s first Anglophone Poet Laureate. With her friend Elizabeth Blanchard, she co-edited Cadence Voix Feminines Female Voices, a multilingual poetry anthology, and co-created the website Poésie Moncton Poetry with Francophone poet Jean-Philippe Raiche. An award-winning writer, her book That Light Feeling Under Your Feet was a finalist for two poetry awards. Her writing has been published internationally and she has performed with accomplished east coast musicians, including the NB Youth Orchestra. She likes to create with artists and has been a featured poet in the Atlantic Vernarcular and AV Fundy projects where she collaborated with visual artist Renata Britez. Kayla hosts Attic Owl Reading Series and works as a writing consultant. In 2021, she received a Top 20 Under 40 Award from the Greater Moncton Chamber of Commerce for her entrepreneurial success and outstanding dedication to the literary arts. She holds an MA in English Creative Writing from the University of New Brunswick. She offers free writing advice on kaylagwrites.com Poets who inspire her are: Forough Farrokhzad, Anne Simpson, Layli long Soldier, Kim Hyseoon, Safia Elhillo, Kathy Jentil-Kijiner, Jake Skeets, Alden Nowlan, Margo Wheaton.
Nisha Patel
Edmonton, AB
Nisha Patel is an award-winning Indo-Canadian poet & artist. She is the City of Edmonton’s Poet Laureate, and the 2019 Canadian Individual Slam Champion, and the 2021 Regional Writer in Residence at the Metro Edmonton Federation of Libraries. She is a recipient of the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Award. Nisha has performed across Canada and the world, from Glasgow to Seoul. Her poetry speaks to themes of race, feminism, and identity, focusing strongly on her struggles and triumphs as a woman of colour. She strives to build strong relationships, mentorship, and opportunities for artists around her, believing in the possibility and forgiveness of the Edmonton arts scene. Nisha is an alumnus of the University of Alberta School of Business. Nisha works to further her goal of building a stronger artistic community through living in her truth.
Adam Pottle
Saskatoon, SK
Adam Pottle is a Deaf author whose writing seeks to expand the possibilities of disabled storytelling. His books include the poetry collection Beautiful Mutants, the novel Mantis Dreams, the novella The Bus, and the memoir Voice. His plays include Ultrasound and the groundbreaking Deaf musical The Black Drum. His works have won or been nominated for numerous awards, including Saskatchewan Book Awards, the Acorn-Plantos Prize, and the ReLit Award. He lives in Saskatoon, and in Fall 2021 will begin his tenure as Writer in Residence at Sheridan College.
Anna Yin
Mississauga, ON
From a Chinese culture-rooted landscape to a new and welcoming Canadian landscape, Anna Yin has found her home in poetry and authored six poetry collections and four books of translations including Mirrors and Windows (Guernica Editions 2021). She won the 2005 Ted Plantos Memorial Award, two MARTYs, two scholarships from USA, three grants from Ontario Arts Council and one from Canadian Arts Council. Anna was appointed to be Mississauga’s Inaugural Poet Laureate (2015-2017) and was elected to be Ontario representative for the League of Canadian Poets (2013-2016). Her poems/translations have appeared at Queen’s Quarterly, ARC Poetry, New York Times, China Daily, CBC Radio, Literary Review of Canada etc. She performed on Parliament Hill, at Austin International Poetry Festival, Edmonton Poetry Festival and INSPIRE Toronto International Book Fair etc. She has designed and hosted various Poetry Alive workshops with multimedia since 2011. After 20 years working in IT field, she has founded SureWay Cultural Services to focus on cultural projects, teaching and writing. Check more: http://annapoetry.com
Lynn Crosbie
Toronto, ON
Lynn Crosbie was born in Montreal and is a cultural critic. A PhD in English literature with a background in visual studies, she teaches at the University of Toronto and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She wrote a novel called Where Did You Sleep Last Night, which was nominated for the Trillium Award and which tells the story of a teenage girl who has a relationship with grunge rocker Kurt Cobain. She is a contributing editor at the Globe and Mail, and a National Magazine Award–winner who has written about sports, style, art, and music.
Sabyasachi Nag
Mississauga, ON
Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag is the author of a story cycle "Hands Like Trees" (Ronsdale Press, 2023), and three poetry collections, including Uncharted (Mansfield Press, 2021) and Could You Please, Please Stop Singing (Mosaic Press, 2015). His work has appeared in Anomaly, Black Fox Literary, Canadian Literature, Grain, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, and The Windsor Review, among other places. An alumnus of the Banff Centre Literary Arts Program, Sachi holds creative writing certificates from the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and Humber College. He is currently an MFA Candidate at the University of British Columbia. He is grateful to have the opportunity to live with his wife and son in Mississauga which is part of the Treaty Lands and Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. You can find him at sachiwrites.com.
Meghan Kemp-Gee
North Vancouver, BC
Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023) and Nebulas (forthcoming 2025), as well as the poetry chapbooks What I Meant to Ask, Things to Buy in New Brunswick, and More. She also co-created Contested Strip, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee, recently adapted into a graphic novel, One More Year. Find her on Twitter @MadMollGreen.
Lucia Misch
Vancouver, BC
LUCIA MISCH is a writer, performer and facilitator from the Bay Area. She can be found on stages across North America, from literary festivals to labour union conventions to local poetry shows, and her first collection, "The Problem With Solitaire," was released by Write Bloody North in 2020. A veteran of the West Coast spoken word scene, Lucia's poetry brings intimacy, compassion and an unflinching frankness to such subjects as body, biography, meaning, depression, queerness, power, grief, self-determination, and disaster. She travels through landscapes actual, internal, and imagined with unorthodox insight, wit and a tangible reverence for language itself. As a teaching artist, Lucia is dedicated to helping others—especially youth—inhabit their creative, personal and political power through writing. She has been working with teenagers in and out of the classroom for almost ten years. Lucia currently lives on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory in East Vancouver.
Ruth Daniell
Kelowna, BC
Ruth Daniell is a speech arts teacher, editor, award-winning writer, and the author of The Brightest Thing (Caitlin Press, 2019). Her work engages with fairy tales, feminism, the lived experience of the body, and the complexities of co-existing on a planet with other living beings. Recent work has appeared in Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Press, 2020), Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees (Caitlin Press, 2022) and on BC’s city buses as part of Poetry in Transit. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (honours) in English literature and writing from the University of Victoria and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. She lives with her family in Kelowna, BC, where she is at work on a new collection of poems about birds, climate change, parenthood, fear, and joy.
Go Deeper
Use our website to engage your students!
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ReadLet your students browse the junior anthology for grades 6-8 and the senior anthology for grades 9-12 using Poem Roulette (search by theme, mood, or poet), the Random Poem, or the Poets page. Discover all kinds of content, including Mixtapes - poetic playlists that delve into a specific topic or theme.There’s truly something for everyone: our collection spans centuries and includes important contemporary Canadian voices, including Billy-Ray Belcourt, Emma Healey, and Canisia Lubrin. |
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ReciteVisit the RECITE section of our site to learn about how our Junior and Senior Recitation Competitions work. You’ll find all the tools you need to run a contest at the classroom and school levels. A Team Regional is a great local contest option too — contact us if you’re interested. |
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WriteStudents in grades 7-12 can submit their original poetry (inspired by the work of other poets) to our journal, VOICES/VOIX and to our monthly poetry prompt prize with chances to win prizes and take part in FutureVerse, an all-expenses paid poetry intensive. Get your students writing now with our writing prompts. |
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BingeScreen a few of our incredible recitation videos, take a quiz (there are no wrong answers!) or listen to an episode of our podcast, which features poets in conversation with the contest finalists who recited their work.
From all of us at Poetry In Voice, thank you for sharing the beauty and power of poetry with your students. |