In a sun-lit library at Shortridge High School one cold October afternoon, high school sophomore Ace Butler is weaving a poem about what happens to your soul when you’re dreaming, how dreams are a gateway to seeing once again loved ones you’ve lost.

“I like poetry,” she said. “It’s soft and smooth.”

Butler likes how she can express her life stories through a creative outlet.

“Take a bite for that child inside your brain, screaming for you to be free,” she reads from a poem she penned.

Butler attends the Shortridge Creative Writing Club, staffed by volunteer mentors through the Kurt Vonnegut Museum Library Youth Writing Program in partnership with Indianapolis Public Schools.

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Over Oreos, Goldfish, and juice, the high schoolers spark quiet revelations. The free snacks first drew 15-year-old Diomande Mantougne to the creative writing club her freshman year.

Now, she’s an award-winning poet, having scored a slam-dunk first-place win at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Oratorical Student contest earlier this year with her piece “One Will” about the fight for Black freedom, a chronicle that takes listeners from her ancestors’ freedom from slavery to 21st century police brutality.

“A life of hardship, because of color. They give obnoxious looks and assume the worst, because of my color,” she writes.

Her poem continues, “We protest in the heat with sweat lines on our face and tears we shed along the way.”

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Not all of the pieces center on serious political topics. There’s an ode to Wing Stop (“This goes out to what I miss most,” McKenzie Brown-Moore, 16, laments), fantastical fiction about the raging wraith who reigns undefeated over all UNO card games, an existentialist monologue by a cricket that was picked from the sidewalk and eaten by a teenager, and, of course, a love poem one girl wrote about the boy on whom she has a crush.

The first time she attended a writing club session, Mantougne said, she felt like she stepped into a new world. One that is welcoming. Where words are a force.

“It’s been years, decades, hundreds, with no type of change,” Mantougne reads. “So it all starts with me. You and us. The revolution has begun. Do you agree?”

What is your organization’s mission?

The program hopes to empower underserved and marginalized students and help them develop confidence.

“The mission of the youth writers’ program is to empower the next generation to make sure that young writers feel like their voices are being heard,” the Kurt Vonnegut Museum Library Youth Writing program director and IPS writing coordinator, Chris Speckman, said. “To feel they have that confidence and authority to participate in these larger conversations about how the world works.”

The students receive coaching through five writing centers at Shortridge High School, Arsenal Tech High School, Crispus Attucks High School, George Washington High School, and a space currently under construction at the Kurt Vonnegut Library Museum.

The volunteer tutors are a mix of adult working professionals and Butler University students enrolled in a service-learning class Speckman offers on how to teach writing.

How many people do you serve?

For the first quarter of the 2023 school year, the program served 1,423 students across the four writing centers in schools and supported teachers with 125 class visits.

Speckman said the writing centers have proven results in improving students’ test performance. Before Shortridge High School had a writing center in 2018, he said, only 18% of seniors earned a grade of 3, equivalent to a C, or better on their International Baccalaureate Extended Essay, a 3,000 to 4,000 word research paper.

In 2022, that number rose to 64 percent, he said.

What is your organization’s No. 1 need?

In addition to money, Speckman said, the program needs more volunteers. He said the program is seeking a diverse range of writing tutors from different colleges, professions, and linguistic backgrounds, especially bilingual tutors who speak Spanish or other languages commonly spoken in the district, such as Haitian Creole.

Volunteers don’t have to be English majors or professional writers, Speckman said.

“Really, anybody with that will to help, with that good-hearted nature to get out in the community and support,” he said.

How can people get involved?

People can get involved in two ways: become a volunteer tutor, who primarily works one-on-one with high school students on their writing —from academic research papers to college application essays. Or become a paid intern making $17 an hour, also working as a writing tutor. However, Speckman said the center is not hiring paid interns right now.

Those interested in volunteering can apply on the Kurt Vonnegut Museum Library website.

IndyStar Season For Sharing

The shared mission of IndyStar’s Our Children initiative and annual Season for Sharing campaign is to harness the power of journalism to make a difference in the lives of Central Indiana youth.

Indiana’s third-grade reading assessment, known as IREAD-3, showed one in five Hoosier students — over 14,000 children — cannot read by the end of third grade. That’s why, with this year’s campaign, we’re focusing on the importance of reading as a foundation for lifelong success. Funds raised by this campaign will be awarded to initiatives promoting reading and literacy in Central Indiana.

Join us in giving at indystar.com/ocdonate. If you prefer to send a check, please mail it to: Central Indiana Community Foundation, Attn: Our Children, 615 N. Alabama St., Suite 300, Indianapolis, IN 46204. You can also text SHARING to 80888.

About the Kurt Vonnegut Museum Library Youth Writing Program

Website: vonnegutlibrary.org/youth-writing-program

Contact IndyStar reporter Ko Lyn Cheang at kcheang@indystar.com or 317-903-7071. Follow her on Twitter: @kolyn_cheang.