Teaching
All grades, K–11
The poet has the opportunity to teach all grades from kindergarten up to 11th grade (the top grade in Honduras). The fellow will be awarded a $1,000.00 honorarium along with a grant to help with travel and living expenses.
Poetry Fellowship
The Our Little Roses Poetry Fellowship
When poet Spencer Reece first arrived at Our Little Roses — bewildered, unable to speak Spanish, shocked by the poverty he saw, feeling utterly useless and insignificant — he was eager to return home after two months. But the night he left, everything changed. One of the girls turned to him and said, “Don’t forget us.”
This fellowship is to honor that girl and all the girls that have ever been a part of the Our Little Roses family, some two hundred abandoned and abused girls who have gone on to become engineers and dentists and more.
Through the OLR Poetry Fellowship, poets from around the world have the opportunity to spend one month at Our Little Roses in San Pedro Sula, live on-site at the home, and teach in the co-ed bilingual school next door.
A month with the girls
Lodging
On-campus apartment
The on-campus lodging, a private, air-conditioned, one-bedroom apartment, allows for optimal interaction with the girls outside of the classroom.
The apartment has a full kitchen, however you are invited to join the girls in the cafeteria as well (we have amazing cooks!).
Celebration
The Poet’s Chair
The fellowship also includes a $500.00 allowance to allow for a celebration of the work while in country. This is usually a pizza party where one of the girls is awarded “The Poet’s Chair”. This should also cover expenses to fund a presentation back home at a library, a poetry center, a YouTube presentation: be creative!
Tradition
The Poet’s Bench
As part of the ending ceremony, students enter their poems into a competition judged by the visiting poet — the winner earns the right to the “Poet’s Bench”, designed by Ana, one of Our Little Roses’ talented woodworkers, with hands holding roses and angel’s wings carved into the bench-back.
The tradition draws on the Welsh “Eisteddfod” — the “chairing of the bard” — brought by poet Sarah Humphries, who joined Spencer Reece during his 2013 Fulbright residency.
Interested in applying for the Poet in Residence Fellowship?
It is easy to apply. Send your resume to OLRFMS@OurLittleRoses.org — include your schooling, teaching experience, language skill level, and publication credits if any. Please include specifically where you first heard of the fellowship.
February is the month during which the Fellowship takes place; dates can sometimes shift. Each year, the selected poet becomes the judge for the following year.
Apply by Email →Our Mentors Through the Years
Spencer Reece
FounderSpencer Reece continues to fulfill his promise to remember the girls. His book, Counting Time Like People Count Stars: Poems by the Girls of Our Little Roses, was published in 2017 by Tía Chucha Press, with essays by Reece and Luis J. Rodríguez and a foreword and afterword by Marie Howe and Richard Blanco. It is accompanied by the award-winning documentary Voices Beyond the Wall, executive produced by James Franco.
Moira Egan
2025–2026A prolific poet and translator with nine books of poetry — five in the United States and four in Italy — most recently The Furies (LSU Press, 2025). She has translated John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, and Ocean Vuong into Italian, and in 2023 received the Academy of American Poets’ Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship.
Charles Olsen & Lilián Pallares
2022–2023A creative duo who run the audiovisual production company antenablue. Lilián is a writer and actress from Barranquilla, Colombia, founder of the theatrical company Afrolyrics; Charles is a New Zealand-born artist, poet, and filmmaker awarded the III Antonio Machado Poetry Fellowship of Segovia and Soria.
Joan Fleming
2020Author of the poetry collections The Same as Yes and Failed Love Poems, both from Victoria University Press. She holds a PhD in ethnopoetics from Monash University and is a Director of the Unamuno Author Series, Madrid. Learn more about Joan’s work →
Annie Schumacher
2019A poet based in Madrid and team member of The Unamuno Author Series, where she helped execute Madrid’s first anglophone poetry festival in 2019.
Layla Benitez-James
2018A poet, translator, and artist living in Alicante, Spain. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, Acentos Review, Matter, and The San Antonio Express-News, among other publications.
Lydia K. Valentine
2017A writer, educator, activist, and mom based in Tacoma, WA — though she grew up in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania.
Luis J. Rodriguez
2016Official Poet Laureate of Los Angeles from 2014–2016. For Luis, poetry is soul talk, a prophetic act, a powerful means to enlarge one’s presence in the world. He taught at Our Little Roses with his wife Trini.
Rebecca Watkins
2014An instructor, writer, and innovator for over 10 years in teaching, writing, and social service. Her strengths are working with immigrant populations and women.
Richard Blanco
GuestThe fifth presidential inaugural poet in U.S. history — the youngest, first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. Richard visited Our Little Roses and worked with Spencer Reece teaching the girls.
Trini Rodriguez
GuestCo-founder of Tía Chucha’s Centro Cultural — a poet, teacher, and indigenous healer who helped teach at Our Little Roses and the Holy Family Bilingual School.
