🌿 July Writing Prompts: Rebirth & Roots

Welcome to July 2025's poetry prompts. These prompts, have been carefully crafted to capture this month's theme: REBIRTH AND ROOTS

Just like this site is blooming, so are we and our writing. Each week brings a fresh lens: from embodiment and resistance to sunlight and spellwork. These prompts are here to nourish your own writing rituals.

You can use these prompts in a notebook, on scraps of paper, a garden journal, or even just the notes app on your phone or computer, and write beneath the stars.

WEEK 1: WHAT DOES FREEDOM FEEL LIKE IN YOUR BODY

In the shadow of Independence Day, reflect on how freedom shows up (or doesn't) in your lived experiences.

• Inspiration: Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Ada Limon

• Prompt: Write a poem that begins with "I am not free until..."

WEEK 2: WHAT HAVE YOU INHERITED AND WHAT WILL YOU GROW

Rituals, grief, joy, silence. Think of intergenerational wisdom and the seeds you're planting.

• Inspiration: Joy Harjo, Ross Gay, Martin Espada

• Prompt: Write a poem in the form of a letter to an ancestor or your future self

WEEK 3: TELL ME WHAT'S BLOOMING

It might not be what you expected. But take pause and take inventory of your life and its surroundings.

• Inspiration: Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, your Summer Garden

• Prompt: Write a praise poem for something small and thriving

WEEK 4: LIGHT YOUR OWN LANTERN

July comes to a close and we must welcome August as it is. We are now prepared to shift towards harvest and reflection. What still needs tending?

• Inspiration: Emily Dickinson, Amanda Gorman, your Inner Altar

• Prompt: Write a spell-poem. Set it up as a set of lines that you'd want to whisper to yourself.

Tip: Let the poems you read this month guide you. Copy a line that stirs something. Sit in the discomfort or enlightenment they bring. Begin your poem with that line or feeling. Let yourself write slowly or wildly.

There is no wrong season to bloom.