A year or two ago when we were in St. Petersburg Beach visiting my great grandpa and my grandpa, my mom and I and my great grandpa went to have chili dogs at the Coney Island Sandwich Shop in downtown St. Petersburg. My great grandpa loves their dogs. This place has been around forever. The son of the original owner now runs it. He also does so much for the community there. We were talking to him while looking at t-shirts, I got a really cool one of Boy George, and incense at the rock-n-roll hairdresser next door to his shop. He was telling us all about what’s happening in St. Pete. He told us about a woman, Maureen, who runs Keep St. Pete Lit.

They are a non-profit literary group that: “celebrates and promotes greater St. Petersburg’s literary community – past, present and future – through arts, education and events with a literary twist.” We looked them up and saw that they were having a writing class for fiction, spoken word poetry, and an open mic poetry reading event that week. We went to the open mic reading and it was fantastic! I read two poems. The classes were wonderful also. The one for poetry was AMAZING!

When we came back to Miami, my mother started looking up things like that here. While she did not find many, there was one particular group that caught her (our) eye. This wonderful group is O, Miami. Do you know what O, Miami is? Maybe, maybe not. Well, it’s a group of people in Miami that do many things to encourage and support the art of Poetry.

She saw that they had a call for submissions for a poetry “contest” for their April Poetry festival. It is to get poetry out in to the community where people can encounter it where they wouldn’t normally. I thought: Why not? Who knows, I might just get picked since there was no exact age limit. As you know, I love dogs, I suggested a project about dogs. It is titled Leading Poetically. I thought that incorporating dogs with poetry was a nice idea. What I want to do is to print poetry on dog leads and hand them out at dog related events, give some to the vet office we use, do something with the local animal shelters, etc.

Guess what? We received an email last week that said they were interested in speaking to me about my project!!! When I know more I will post about it.