Very Great Sound: The Case for Teaching Poetry to Nonspeaking Autistic Students

• By: Ralph James Savarese Grinnell College
• July 9th, 2026
• autism education, autism research, creative writing, neurodiversity, nonspeaking autistic students, poetry therapy, self-expression, sensory language, Summer 2026 Issue
• 8    0

Last April, I found myself in a Stockholm studio, sitting next to my college buddy Spencer Reece, with whom I'd taken my first creative writing course forty-three years ago—our teacher was the Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard. We had traveled to Sweden to teach our own creative writing...