Ten-year-old Jessica Jacobs is a poet. And she knows it.

“When I grow up, I want to be a famous writer,” she said last week.

She’s well on her way. Jacobs, a Riverside School student, is one of the students in a new poetry class for American Indian youth at Pelathe Community Resource Center – and the class is working hard to compile enough poems to publish its own book this spring.

The class is taught for free by Tom Mach, a writer from California who recently retired to Lawrence. Classes, which usually have between three and seven students, started in October.

“It was kind of a fluke,” Mach said. “I was looking for a tutoring job, but I couldn’t find one. Somebody at the volunteer center said, ‘Why don’t you look at Pelathe?’ Here I am.”

Caroline Hicks, Pelathe’s assistant director, hopes the lessons learned with Mach are carried into the youngsters’ other classrooms.

“This is not just about the kids’ writing; it’s about them learning,” Hicks said. “A lot of native kids have a lot they want to express, especially about their culture. What Tom’s doing is giving them the tools to express that.”

Chamisa Edmo, 11-year-old Pinckney student, agrees.

Chamisa Edmo, 11, left, listens to novelist Tom Mach talk about poems and their content during a creative writing class at the Pelathe Community Resource Center, 1423 Haskell Ave.

“You get to express yourself, and you can let people see it,” she said. “It’ll be cool to see my poems in a book.”

Jacobs is learning that there are different methods of expressing her ideas in poetry.

“I’m not really a rhymer,” she said. “I just write poems that are real or that I have in my head.”

That’s the point, Mach said.

“The benefit is to make writing fun, so the kids can learn to love words,” he said. “If they can learn to use words like a paint brush, they’ll paint real good pictures.”

The class is free, starting at 4 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The book is made possible by a $500 grant from the Lawrence Arts Guild.

Graceful DaysGraceful days are days with yourselfA day like a powwow dayA graceful powwow dayA do-anything dayIt’s like a day at the parkA take-it-easy daySoon the graceful days are over to just be yourself.– Jessica Jacobs, 10

Mach’s volunteering and the guild’s grant have been a stroke of good fortune for Pelathe, which has struggled to raise enough cash for operations since former director Dave Cade left last year.

“This has been a real no-cost program for us,” Hick said. “With our fiscal difficulties, that’s been great.”

Hicks said the program may be expanded to include non-American Indian children.

“Can you imagine being 9 years old and being a published author?” she asked. “How cool is that?”