MORE than 20 schools are scheduled to be visited during this year’s staging of the Jamaica Poets Nomadic College and School Tour.

The tour, which started on Friday, is slated to run until November 15, and will be officially launched next Thursday at 6:00 pm at the Corporate Area-based Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts.

According to Malachi Smith, founder of the tour, it is a motivating switch that is flicked to improve students’ coping skills and overall development.

“It starts and continues a process,” declared Smith, who was supported by Dionne Davis, former English language and literature teacher at the Pembroke Hall High School.

“The tour clearly inspires the students to do more, and they are engaged to use words to express themselves to enable better interaction without being quick to quarrel,” added Davis, who is particularly heartened at how some students who are usually shy and withdrawn have bloomed as a result of the workshops conducted by the poets on the tour.

In the meantime, Donna Tinglin, dean of studies at St Andrew Technical High School, has pointed to the content of the presentations and how students are encouraged to participate.

“Long after these sessions the students recall and recite various lines and are more involved in creative writing,” said Tinglin.

Similar sentiments were expressed by Audrey Daley, principal of the Young Women Christian Association Vocational School (YWCA) in Spanish Town, St Catherine, who has called for more of these sessions.

“We must have more follow-up, it’s needed. It energises them and that can be clearly seen – and they do remember the various messages about how they should see themselves,” said Daley.

This year, for the first time, school participation will mark the tour’s launch, which will have as its guest speaker Dr Aisha Spencer, senior lecturer in language and literature education in the Faculty of Humanities and Education at The University of the West Indies, Mona campus.

Spencer has been teaching language and literature for more than 23 years and is the co-editor of an anthology of Caribbean poetry, titled
Give the Ball to the Poet. The launch will be hosted by Dr Amina Blackwood-Meeks, senior lecturer at Edna Manley College.

The 2024 tour, the sixth such staging, will be under the patronage of Kwame Dawes, poet laureate of Jamaica.

The tour’s theme will highlight conflict resolution with a stellar line-up of poets presenting their works.

The participating poets will include Kwame MA McPherson, the first Jamaican to win the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2023); Tomlin Ellis, founding member of Poets in Unity and the Poetry Society of Jamaica; Cherry Natural, International Reggae and World Music Awards winner; and Smith, who is an internationally acclaimed award-winning dub poet.

A main feature of the tour will be the publication of the second anthology by participating poets. Dubbed the
Nomadic Second Words, it was designed by Judith Falloon-Reid and edited by Professor Opal Palmer Adisa and Smith.