Joaquin Zihuatanejo – Write Club: Art of Teaching Students How to Write Their Wrongs – TEDxKids@SMU 2015
Write Club is an idea by award winning teacher and World Poetry Slam Champion, Joaquín Zihuatanejo to provide a platform for young people who love writing as much, if not more than they love football. Write Club is a place for all of the beautifully odd students who write poetry to gather and feel safe and most importantly be heard. With a faculty advisor, a space, and a collection of youth poets you just might write or hear a poem that will change you, or someone else, or your community, or the world entire. And as long as you remember the first rule of Write Club, your club will thrive. The first rule of Write Club is everybody talks about Write Club.
Joaquín Zihuatanejo is an award winning teacher, an HBO Def Poet, and a World Poetry Slam Champion. Born and raised in the barrio of East Dallas, in his work Joaquin strives to capture the duality of the Chicano culture. Joaquín has been called by critics “one of the most dynamic and passionate performance poets in the country, melding equal parts comedy, poetry, and dramatic monologue into a crowd-pleasing display of verbal fireworks…always thrilling, Joaquín’s hilariously manic presentation is full of compassion and nuance, never sacrificing substance for style, leading many to call him poetry slam’s answer to John Leguizamo.”
Joaquín has two passions in his life, his wife Aída and poetry, always in that order.