By Joanne Mallari

As a student who grew up in a low-income household, public programming gave me valuable opportunities to engage with the arts. My earliest literacy sponsors included local librarians and mentors who worked with students in Las Vegas’ Clark County School District. When I started writing poems in sixth grade, my English teacher connected me with a summer program called the Southern Nevada Writing Project. The program culminated in an anthology that made room for a range of stories, diverse yet intersecting. When I saw my essay in the table of contents, I embraced my writing as my voice to the world. Eighteen years later, I have the privilege of working with talented colleagues to create safe spaces for adolescents to share their stories.

During my term as the 2019 Nevada Humanities Poet in Residence, I learned about the literacy programs sponsored by Sierra Arts Foundation. I trained to be a teaching-artist for Teen Empowerment, which addresses issues of self-harm in Washoe County School District by fostering a sense of belonging among adolescents through the arts. I served at Dilworth STEM Academy for eight weeks, where I collaborated with social studies faculty members Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Jones. Thanks to support from the administration at Dilworth, we brought the Teen Empowerment Program to all 225 sixth graders.

As a teaching-artist, I worked with Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Jones to integrate spoken word into the social studies curriculum. While the instructors delivered the core content, I worked closely with both teachers to design writing exercises that would help students understand and make personal connections to the material. One week, we learned about how the Nile shaped Egyptian civilization, and the students wrote about local bodies of water. Another week, the students learned about the ongoing debate over Egypt’s antiquities, and they reflected on questions of ownership by writing about their own treasures. By putting the past in conversation with the present, we explored what it means to create a shared, local identity while honoring our particular histories.

At the conclusion of my residency, Tia Flores, director of Sierra Arts Foundation, asked me this: “If you could describe your experience in one word, what would it be?” For me, the word was already built into the program name: empowerment. Empowerment is a two-way street where we learn from one another. As a teaching-artist, I collaborate with students and staff so that we may enhance learning; and in this process, I also grow as a writer. My students taught me to go back to basics—to return to that slate where I first let language play.

Halfway to Golden
By Joanne Mallari

I haven’t seen Nevada

more snow-capped

than it is now,

on the lonely stretch

of Highway 50. Before

the signal cut out,

I was listening

to Delilah, who said

that the right person

at the wrong time

is the wrong person.

Dad proposed to Mom

during her limited

stay in the U.S.

How could anyone

know, on bended

knee, whether it is fate

or bad timing? Halfway

to golden, she peels pictures

from the wedding album,

the weight of twenty-five

years collapsing a dam.

This drive is different

in summer, when the desert

floods me like ampersand:

& hills & sand & sage.

Today it’s frost & fog & road.

The highway leads to a home

whose cracks persist,

where contractors return

time and again

to spackle fault lines

around the windows.

When Mom & Dad

look through glass,

do they fly past regret

like jets & clouds & sun?

They play it by ear

for God or kids or love.

Unlike them, I shy

from improv, listen

to the radio, hang on

to a stranger’s words

like a mantra: right person,

wrong time, wrong person.

I think it must be easier

to let ourselves fall

with no concept of time,

like my parents

before the love cut out.

Joanne Mallari holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her debut chapbook, Daughter Tongue, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in November 2020. She served as the 2019 Nevada Humanities Poet in Residence, and she participated in the 2019 Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl.

Images/Joanne Mallari

Teen Empowerment at Dilworth STEM Academy