“I Never Want to Write From Just My Perspective”: Identity‐Making in Youth's Collaborative Writing of Spoken Word Poetry

ABSTRACT Writing is an important site of identity construction and enactment, especially for adolescent writers. In this study, we explore several interactions across writing sessions in a youth after‐school spoken word poetry team. The participants were engaged in writing a collaboratively‐authored “group poem” in which they took up and wrote in one another's voices and perspectives toward a piece of writing that ultimately emerged from the assemblage rather than any one poet. This paper examines the poets' identity‐making and perspective‐taking through exchanges related to one part of their poem over the course of three different days. We ask: How did youth poets engage with their own and others' identities and perspectives through the collaborative writing of a group poem? We find that participants' writing reflects a flexible understanding of identity as they highlight different aspects of their own identities and move in and out of each other's to take up different perspectives. However, we also find that participants' perspective‐taking allowed them both to express themselves and to understand each other. Throughout, we argue that all writing—not just writing with multiple authors—is collaborative and the product of an assemblage, rather than any individual, and call for attention to the sociomaterial landscape in which writers compose, including accounting for materials, bodies, and affect.