In 2021, M. Bartley Seigel was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Seigel launched the Upper Peninsula (U.P.) Young Poets Program, in collaboration with state public and tribal high school teachers, which introduces high school students in Michigan’s underserved, rural Upper Peninsula to the diversity and transformative power of poetry, encouraging their own emerging voices, and providing them with a college-level writing workshop that will be offered at no cost. Selected youth poetry produced in the student workshops will be published and promoted on social media. It will be the only such program serving approximately fourteen thousand Upper Peninsula public high school and tribal students.