“The summer sun/Burns my face, at least it’s/Not snowing,” writes Ava Martina, a third-grader from Akron Elementary School. This tiny, beautiful poem is featured in the latest issue of Wordplay, which was recently released by Just Buffalo Literary Center.

For more than 20 years, Just Buffalo has published Wordplay, an annual student anthology of creative writing, to showcase the student writing produced in Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Writers in Education programs. It works to provide both an outlet for creativity and a stage where young imaginations can shine. Wordplay can be valued by anyone who wishes to be moved by the mystery and machinery of language.

As the current editor of Wordplay, I am amazed at how these young people are able to let their creative writing carry them to wild new discoveries. I enjoyed reading the more than 700 submissions, and wish I could share the classrooms filled with the eager faces, squirming with anticipation to share their poems aloud.

Pick up a copy of Wordplay and be inspired by the amazing, young imaginations of Buffalo. Find a digital version of Wordplay online at www.justbuffalo.org. Limited copies of the print edition are available at Just Buffalo Literary Center’s office in the Market Arcade in downtown Buffalo. The work inside will remind you of what it means to look at the world from the eyes of a child, and the mind of a poet.

Inside

of

me

there’s

hope

everywhere.

There’s

hope

even in

you.

—Caroline Finkbeiner, third grade, Frederick Law Olmsted School, PS 64