I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent: How Poetry Changed a Group of At-Risk Young Women Lessons in Rehabilitation and Letting It Go

A Mourning Mother, a Group of Girls and the Power of Rehabilitative PoetryAfter the death of her child, a grief-stricken psychotherapist volunteers as a poetry teacher at a residential treatment facility for “delinquent” girls. Here, their mutual support nourish and enrich each other, though not without large quantities of drama and recalcitrance. For fans of the acclaimed movies Stand and Deliver and The Freedom Writers Diary comes I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent: How Poetry Changed a Group of At-Risk Young Women.Learning to let go of grief and loss. The death of a child and the subsequent quest for coping strategies is hardly a new story. For psychotherapist, teacher, and writer Sharon L. Charde, a decade of writing therapy with young women helped her let go of much of her grief, or at least to learn how to carry it differently. This is her account of her journey.Writing poetry is writing therapy. Compelling, appealing, poignant and often hilarious, I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent chronicles the passion that grew for pushing voices out into the world. As Sharon and the girls share their losses through weekly writing, they came to realize their unlimited potential and poetic talents.Healing from trauma. Healing can come in surprising ways across age and social class, as it did for both the girls and Sharon. But what happens when Sharon finally grasps that the most challenging experiences are the best teachers? Narrated in five parts, the book also contains poems written by the girls, as well as excerpts from their writing, Sharon’s son’s writing, and her own.If you have read books such as Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, The Freedom Writers Diary, Between the World and Me, So You Want to Talk about Race, or Reviving Ophelia; you will love I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent: How Poetry Changed a Group of At-Risk Young Women.
The #metoo movement, particularly the horrific Larry Nasser abuse, shows with frightening clarity the vulnerability of young women to male predators; all the Touchtone girls I encountered suffered similar or worse fates. The book is a pilgrimage, a quest story, divided into five sections. Part I explores the authors first year at the facility, the difficulty and eventual success of establishing my group in such a chaotic and contradictory culture. It recreates their writing sessions, and features the vivid, dramatic personalities of the girls who participated as well as the steep learning curve on which she found herself daily. Part II moves swiftly through the trials and victories between the first and last years, and offers brief profiles of three of the residents who held special resonance to the author. During this time she published an award-winning anthology of poems by the girls, a NYC filmmaker created a documentary film, many readings and public performances took place and received several awards for the program. Part III tells of the joint venture with The Hotchkiss School, revealing the differences yet common ground between the two groups of girls.