Krista Franklin does not consider writing to be her only calling. An esteemed poet with two manuscripts and many published pieces under her belt, Franklin's heart is in her poetry, but her life's work is in education, sharing the talent and knowledge she has with adolescents who have been told all their lives that they have no voice and even if they did, no one is interested in hearing it.

Franklin has been the artist-in-residence for the past three weeks at A Studio In The Woods, a secluded artist's retreat on the Westbank at the easternmost edge of Orleans Parish. The artists' community, founded by visual artists Lucianne and Joe Carmichael, began opening up the space last year for artists to do three to four week residencies. The studio is situated on 7.6 acres that make up the only existing bottomland hardwood forest left in New Orleans.

Franklin's residency sponsors were impressed with her work from the outset. Co-founder Joe Carmichael said the panel who reviewed Franklin's proposal was very impressed by the seriousness of her purpose. Franklin came to ASITW to reflect and write about her experience teaching creative writing to inner-city youth.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Franklin had always been a writer, but it took a while for her to devote her energies to it full time. Then, at age 30, at the nudging of a friend, Franklin did what she said was the most spontaneous thing of her life - moving to Chicago with no plan.

"It sounded ludicrous," she told The Louisiana Weekly. "I was working in a full-time job and I thought, 'I never make decisions like that.'" I always played it safe and I decided to see if I could do it. So she packed up and moved away, living far away from her family for the first time in her life.

A former graduate student and ticket agent at a local theater, Franklin came into teaching upon arriving in Chicago and discovering an organization called Young Chicago Authors. "The organization is dedicated to changing young people's lives and allowing them to have a voice through writing," she said. She began working full time in alternative schools leading poetry and female empowerment workshops with 16 to 21 year olds.

Raised as an only child in a Dayton suburb, working with urban Chicago teenagers has given her much growth in maturity and perspective, the poet said.

Franklin describes her initial approach going in as a "wet-behind-the-ears, naïve 'I'm-gonna-change-the-world' attitude. My teaching practices have changed over the course of three years where I know I'm doing well if I can reach two or three and get them all to write something every day we're together," she said.

Franklin's appreciation of her students and her anger and frustration with the state of the nation's public school system has fueled much of her work that she has begun at ASITW, work that she intends to form into a chap-book.

While at ASITW, Franklin also took out time from her creative work to do a workshop with students at the New Orleans Alternative School, who already come to the studio for nature classes.

Franklin describes her artistic work as "poetic documentation" or "poetic exploration," an artistic journey into the observations she has about the people and world around her.

The poet, educator and visual collage artist sees activism in the straightforwardness of the work she has produced at ASITW. "My students have taught me how brutal the education system is," she said. "The brutalities they've faced in the classrooms at the hands of teachers . . . teachers who told them, 'you won't amount to shit' and 'you'll be lucky if you graduate.'"

Because she feels she has been blessed by having positive reinforcement from family and friends over the years, it seems only natural to extend this to her students.

"I have to coerce them into writing," she said. "A lot would never identify themselves as writers or poets and I have to fight them tooth and nail to put a pen to the paper. When they read their work aloud, I have to point out to them ... 'Did you hear that line? Listen to the music in what you've written ...' Once I do that, they become to be a little more OK with being called writer or poet."

Franklin said that she found a new home in Louisiana, one not so different from where she was raised. "[Being here] really has impacted my creative perspective," she said. "This place provided me with dream space. Just being able to have the time with imagination when everything you are doing on a day-to-day basis is not smothering your creative energies."

After taking the mental and physical space she needed from her students to write about them, she wants to bring back the serenity she has found at ASITW to them and "the beauty that is Louisiana."

She said she is ready to return to work with her students, who she feels are the real teachers. "They've taught me a lot about the strength of the human character, about survival," she said. "They've taught me a lot about history and how certain choices that generations before them made have created this generation, for better or worse."

She remembers the moment when she realized she was a poet. As an undergraduate Pan African Studies major at Kent University, Franklin took a creative writing class. "I was on the campus bus and was writing this racial political poet called 'Cleopatra Don't Look Like Liz Taylor.' As I was writing it, I started to cry and it was in that moment that I realized that I was a poet. That this was my life's calling and that I could find truths about myself through poetry," Franklin said. She hopes her students will continue to discover those truths about themselves. "When I hear them acknowledge their work, I think, 'There's another one. When I'm ashes in the ground, they'll be five more of me out there,'" she said. "That feels good."

The following is an excerpt from Krista Franklin's work-in-progress composed at A Studio In The Woods.

II.D squared

My little sister's skin is the color of a coral shell that rests on the sandy beaches of Puerto Rico. On the days she wears her hair down, Africa betrays her, a sea of curls fans out around her face, spirals past her shoulders like the weather-worn lash of the Spaniard overseer on the black back of the original Boriqua. As she passes me in the hallway, I tell her how pretty she looks.

Behind the closed door of the principal's office where I uncomfortably play the role when ours isn't here, she slouches at the desk in a straight backed chair where we meet to discuss HER chronic absenteeism. She refuses justification, chooses silence over explanation. When I push her for answers, her eyes erupt a volcano of tears.

"I'm going through a lot."

Is all she'll say, despite declarations of understanding, despite my listening ear tuned to the trauma of teenaged years. She keeps her fingers pressed to her mouth trapping in the demons of her Pandora's Box life.

"I can handle it. I'll come to school every day. Don't call me mother. I'll do better."

I can't do a thing but believe her, watch her sign her name to the contract created for students like her - kids whose vice-grip lives are closing in on them, whose problems worm in on them while they sit through history lessons that teach them nothing of survival.

When she rises and leaves, she takes a piece of my mind with her.

Love locks my gut like the jaws of a bitch.

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