In 2001, Will Marinell, who was teaching in Kenya and Bangladesh, partnered with Lou Bernieri at Phillips Academy in Massachusetts to begin a poetry exchange between their students. Lou and Will planned the six-week exchange curriculum during an Andover Bread Loaf Writing Workshop in 1999, writing, “We were acutely aware that our students were not only in very different places geographically and culturally, but they were also in different educational climates.” Nevertheless, in studying African and African American poetry together, students quickly overcame these differences through a flood of written reflections and personal poetry exchanged between them. Reflecting on the project, Will and Lou wrote, “Cultural awareness and tolerance cannot so much be taught as arrived upon through intimate dialogue among peers.”
