Travis Watkins, a Kansas University graduate who played for the Jayhawks football team from 2000 to 2005, returns to Lawrence Thursday to be part of a poetry slam at Van Go Mobile Arts.

Watkins volunteered at Van Go during college, mentoring at-risk youth, teaching them the basics of creating a poem and communicating the value of using poetry for self-expression.

The slam will be at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Van Go work shite, 715 N.H. Original poetry by participants in the JAMS program (Jobs in the Arts Make Sense) will be featured. Watkins also will perform.

Watkins, who teaches in Houston as part of Teach for America, won the College Language Association’s Creative Writing Contest in April of 2005, and performed with Jessica Care Moore-Poole at the 65th annual C.L.A Convention in Athens, Ga. He is founder of Layman Lyric Productions, which represents and publishes college poets. He is planning his first college tour, set to kick off this fall in Texas.