News Detail
National Poetry Month at RE: Poetry Flourishes at Ransom Everglades
At Ransom Everglades, April means more than spring – it signals a month-long celebration of poetry. Now in its fourth year, the school’s National Poetry Month programming continues to grow, offering students, alumni, and the wider RE community opportunities to write, delight, and connect through verse. Throughout the month, students were invited to respond to weekly poetry prompts or submit original work of their choosing online to the school's NaPoMo @ RE website.
Ninth graders wrote sonnet crowns, exploring formal structure and interconnected thought. Tenth graders experimented with blackout poetry, using American literary texts as a canvas, and created bio poems inspired by elders in their lives.
In the Personal Narrative class, students organized lunchtime “pop-up” poetry events aimed at capturing the spirit of Miami through spontaneous writing. This year's NaPoMo theme, Miami: Currents and Crossroads, encouraged students to explore the city’s layered identity – its colors, movements, histories, and migrations – through weekly writing prompts.
For week one, “Colors of the City”, students selected paint chips and used the evocative names of the colors as inspiration for poems. Another week focused on “Roots and Routes,” inviting reflections on migration, belonging, and identity in a city defined both by deep roots and continual change and movement. In the final week, themed “Currents and Connections”, students wrote “message in a bottle” poems to future Miamians, reflecting on the social and natural landscapes that shape the city’s evolving story.
Ransom Everglades welcomed Miami-Dade’s current Poet Laureate, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, to campus. She read from her work and led a workshop on bio poems, encouraging students to draw on personal and community histories for the Generation 305 Archive project.
RE students also made a mark on the broader Miami poetry scene. Submitting to the O’Miami in the “ZIPodes”. In addition, five students were named Poetry Night at the Barnacle competition, which received more than 600 submissions from high schoolers across the city. Five of the top-15 finalists hailed from RE who shared their work live at a ceremony with Richard Blanco and Jaswinder Bolina, and the school swept the top three prizes: Miguel Kumar ’25 (first place), Alexa Charouhis ’27 (second), and Patrick Keedy Brown ’26 (third).
In a fusion of science and the arts, Ransom students also contributed to the online platform www.sciencepoets.com, a site designed by Dieter Manstein ’25. The site features ekphrastic poems inspired by scientific and artistic imagery, connecting creativity with inquiry and showcasing work by RE students and others in the scientific community.
The month culminated on Thursday, April 24, with a community poetry reading and celebration at La Brisa, where students and faculty shared their work in an evening dedicated to the power of language and the vibrancy of Miami life.
With many poems written, dozens of student participants, and a flurry of creativity echoing across campus and beyond, April at Ransom Everglades has proven, once again, that poetry is very much alive – and thriving.
Corinne Rhyner
Corinne Rhyner
English Faculty Member
Middle School
2045 South Bayshore Drive, Coconut Grove, FL 33133Phone: 305 250 6850
Upper School
3575 Main Highway, Coconut Grove, FL 33133Phone: 305 460 8800
Founded in 1903, Ransom Everglades School is a coeducational, college preparatory day school for grades 6 - 12 located on two campuses in Coconut Grove, Florida. Ransom Everglades School produces graduates who "believe that they are in the world not so much for what they can get out of it as for what they can put into it." The school provides rigorous college preparation that promotes the student's sense of identity, community, personal integrity and values for a productive and satisfying life, and prepares the student to lead and to contribute to society.