Winner of the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2019 The Poet X has joined our growing collection of books that celebrate the diversity of writer’s experiences and the backgrounds from which they come. The Poet X tells the story of a young Dominican girl in Harlem who feels unheard and is not sure anyone actually wants to hear her voice until she is invited to participate in a poetry competition.

The Poet X is a significant addition to our LRC as it gives an accessible route into poetry for our students. Themes of anger, religion and growing up within a world that seems against you are things that many young people can relate to.

A strength of reading poetry is that it provides an alternative means by which we can empathise with others as well as being a bridge into another world. For those students who find novels daunting through length or due to the number of words written on a page this is an accessible medium by which to build connections and understanding of other people’s lives in society and across the world.

The fact that The Poet X is sculptured through self-contained poems into a coherent story makes it particularly ‘user-friendly’ for our students. Having a variety of texts within our LRC enables the further development of reading, speaking and listening skills within our student body encouraging them to develop fluency and deepen their communication skills as they naturally make connections between their experiences and those being expressed within the text.