It’s not every day the students of White Station High School walk by an award-winning poet. Or maybe it is.

Aasritha Butti (12) is the 2025 Memphis Youth Poet Laureate (MYPL), a title bestowed only once each year. The MYPL program is open to all Mid-South high schoolers, ages 13-19, who must submit an application form, a detailed resume and up to five original works. One of Butti’s works that she believes judges were particularly fond of was ‘Circles in the Sky.’ The poem focuses on her grandmother, on her experiences in India and how the two have shaped her as a person.

“I thought that people like me, from my background, weren’t as represented in the poetic sense,” Butti said. “I didn’t see a lot of poetry that wasn’t written by a white male or a white person. So, I thought it was important to kind of get my stories and people, you know, who look like me and their stories out. And it’s just really fun. I really enjoy it.”

Butti started writing poetry in seventh grade, but did not begin submitting works to contests until 11th grade. Feeling inspired by the work of previous Scholastic Art and Writing award winners, Butti decided to submit work to the competition, winning three Gold Keys — the highest honor given in the contest.

“I’ve always really liked going into the library, checking out books and reading, and I think that poetry is just another form of self expression,” Butti said. “It’s not limited to a narrative sense in the way that novels and books are.”

Butti also attended the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio’s Summer Residential Program in June, where 10th-12th grade students spend two weeks focusing on one core course, like poetry. Each day, participants spent seven to eight hours in classes, with Butti and others staying in the lounge late at night to work on pieces.

“The people are so encouraging and everyone is super talented, but everyone is super humble about it,” Butti said. “They just encourage you to read and to write and I think that’s — that’s obviously something I really like to do — so being around people who are like-minded yet still diverse in thought and personalities was so rewarding.”

A key part of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio is that participants work with instructors who are graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop or graduates of University of Iowa’s Master of Fine Arts programs. Butti’s instructor, Erin Sherry, is a surrealist fiction writer, exposing Butti to a new style of writing.

“Going there and reading [Sherry’s] stories and how she wrote, it was honestly — it brought a tear to my eye,” Butti said. “That’s dramatic, but her work is so good and she kind of pushed fiction writing onto us even though some of us were poets.”

There is no set formula for writing. Butti finds inspiration throughout the day and writes her thoughts down, writing lines of poetry once she feels moved to and focusing on her emotions, saying “it comes to me, which is cliche, but it comes to me.”

“[Poetry is] totally about individuality and just being true to who you are, even if other people might not resonate with it,” Butti said. “But if they do resonate with it, that’s obviously another super cool additional incentive.”

Butti has this advice to give aspiring writers:

“Read as much as you can. Talk to other writers and even people who aren’t writers to see what they’re feeling, and if they’re feeling something similar and you’re, you know, you feel strongly about it, I think you can definitely get some words onto paper. Then if you can do that and keep on thinking on how to refine your work, how to best express exactly what you’re feeling, like any emotion, just kind of hone into it.”

This story was originally published on The Scroll on September 24, 2025.