As concerns about youth mental health grow, a creative writing program at the Mesa Arts Center is offering students a place to name and work through difficult feelings. The initiative, called LIT Ink, is built around poetry and storytelling and is designed for Arizona students in grades 5 through 12. Organizers say the 24-week program is offered at no cost and concludes with a public presentation where participants read or display the pieces they have developed.
Audience members watch a screening during the LIT Ink: Picture This Showcase, the Mesa Arts Center event where students present work created in the poetry program.
The showcase, titled LIT Ink: Picture This Showcase, brings the work students create in class to a broader audience. Instructors say the event supplies a formal moment of recognition and allows young writers to experience their words being seen and heard beyond the classroom. Students spend the weeks leading up to the showcase learning craft—how to shape a line, create an image, and order a narrative—as well as how to connect personal experience to a form they can share.
For the program’s lead instructor, Diana Resendiz, the decision to teach poetry is rooted in a long personal history with mental health challenges. She described a period nearly two decades ago when anxiety overtook daily life: trouble concentrating, disrupted sleep, unexpected crying spells, and panic attacks. Those symptoms escalated to a suicide attempt and required hospitalization and inpatient treatment, Resendiz said. A clinical diagnosis of major depression and subsequent medication were followed by a new element in her recovery: writing became part of her therapy.
Over time, Resendiz turned the private notebooks and diaries she kept into published work. Her book, Postcards from the Desert, she says, grew out of materials she had already written and functioned as a kind of communication with her younger self. "As I’m reading through everything, it slowly turned into almost like a love letter to myself, to my younger self," she said, describing how revision and organization reshaped disparate entries into a coherent collection. That experience, she says, informs how she guides young people through the often delicate work of turning trauma into art.
Students who take part in LIT Ink report similar discoveries about the relationship between speech and written expression. "Honestly, it’s hard for me to really say what’s on my mind. So, I feel like writing would help others and help myself at the same time," said seventh grader Liliana Gutierrez, speaking about how the program has allowed her to find a different mode of expression. In workshops, students are asked not only to draft and edit poems but to reflect on the feelings and moments behind the lines—how an image can stand in for a pain that is hard to say aloud and how a structure can hold chaotic feeling long enough to examine it.
High school senior Arisa Valenzuela described how one poem became a form of closure after the death of her father when she was 11. Valenzuela wrote a piece titled "Conversations We Never Had," and later read it aloud at his gravesite. "I love to talk, but really talking about my feelings wasn’t the easiest, especially in my household," she said, noting that the written poem gave her a channel for things she had not spoken before. The experience of sharing the poem both within the program and at a personal memorial helped her reconcile aspects of her grief, she said. Valenzuela also said her first published poem in the program dealt with how relationships with her father’s family changed after his death and that bringing the poem into public view contributed to a sense of resolution.
Resendiz, who encourages students to share work when they feel ready, said the act of publication or performance can be validating in itself. "It helped me process. And then eventually, once I started sharing, I felt like it helped me feel like that happened. And now I can do something positive with it," she said, describing a progression from private pain to public authorship. That arc—from experience to articulation to audience—is central to the program’s approach: craft is taught alongside techniques for emotional safety, and students are given options about how and when to make their pieces public.
A stylized image of Arizona students walking on campus, used to illustrate youth participating in programs like LIT Ink that use creative writing to address mental health.
LIT Ink opens applications each spring through the Mesa Arts Center website. The program’s administrators emphasize that it is free for eligible Arizona students in grades 5 through 12 and that instruction spans roughly half a year. In addition to offering writing workshops and a culminating showcase, the program connects young writers to mentors and to a peer community that organizers say can reduce isolation. For anyone in crisis, organizers remind readers that the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is reachable 24 hours a day by calling or texting 988.
The LIT Ink program now culminates each year in the L’ink Up Festival, a free one-day gathering at Mesa Arts Center that unites students from multiple Valley residencies for storytelling, performances, and connection. It builds on the workshops by offering a broader public platform for grades 5–12 to share work developed over 24 weeks. Details at mesaartscenter.com.