It's 7 a.m. Thursday in Maria Elena Wakamatsu's Desert View High School creative writing class and her 25-plus students are sitting in front of their computer terminals. As she walks around the small computer lab, Wakamatsu, in a clear, crisp voice, refreshes her students' drowsy memories about their assignment.

The students are writing a fundraising letter. The class intends to solicit funds to pay for a student publication of creative writing, involving students from Tucson High School and City High, a Downtown charter school, in cooperation with the University of Arizona.

They need to be creative and confident, Wakamatsu tells them. If they are, good things will come, she promises them.

"You guys will make it happen. I know we're going to get the money," says the peppy Wakamatsu, an award-winning published poet and teacher.

Teaching students to write fundraising letters is part of Wakamatsu's commitment to involve her students in writing activities that take them outside the classroom.

She encourages them to enter their work in contests, submit their writing to publications, and read them in public places. She encourages her students to grow as writers and gain indelible experience.

"Contest participation is critical," she said after class, in her small school office. "It gets them to understand their commitment."

Outside classroom participation, she added, infuses the students with pride that they went the extra step to improve their work. By doing so, "you just elevate their game in every respect," said Wakamatsu, the 2005 Sunnyside Unified School District Star Teacher and winner of the 2008 Mary Ann Campau Fellowship, which recognizes Southern Arizona writers.

Several of Wakamatsu's students have shown they have game.

Three of her students in the past nine years have earned first place in the annual Bilingual Corrido Contest for High School Students, sponsored by the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

Other students have earned honors in the annual Bilingual Poetry Contest sponsored by the Tucson Poetry Festival.

In the 2008 spring corrido contest, which I judged, Desert View sophomore Gamaliel Rabago won first place for his poetic interpretation of Manuel Jesús Córdova Soberanes, an illegal immigrant, who found 9-year-old Christopher Buchleitner alone near Arivaca on a November night last year after the boy's mother crashed their vehicle and died.

Rabago was new to poetry writing in Wakamatsu's class.

When students sign up for her class for the first time, "they don't come in thinking of themselves as creative and artists," said Wakamatsu, head of Desert View's English Department.

When they leave, some of her students are transformed into assured, budding writers.

Wakamatsu sees a lot of herself in her students when she was their age.

She was born in San Luis Rio Colorado, Sonora, across the border from Somerton, where she grew up near Yuma. Her blue-collar parents, a Japanese father who once worked as a bracero and a Mexican mother "who was the consummate story teller," taught her that artists have "a community voice."

At school the message was different for a young Wakamatsu. She could not be an artist or a writer because she was not from the privileged class, Wakamatsu said.

She thought otherwise but she did not start off as a writer.

After graduating from Arizona State University she entered law school but didn't finish. Instead she went to work with the United Farm Workers union and other labor organizations in the Phoenix area.

She returned to Yuma and took a job teaching English to adult migrant workers. When she turned to teaching at a Yuma junior high school, she discovered her calling.

She found teaching challenging and satisfying, especially working with young people who came from a world similar to hers.

Since 1986, Wakamatsu has applied her passion to Sunnyside District students, first at Sierra Middle School, then Desert View on East Valencia Road, near South Alvernon.

Wakamatsu, 54, could be teaching elsewhere as she is sometimes reminded, even by friends, because of Desert View's South Side location. She finds the attitude offensive and wrong.

"I have the best kids in the world," Wakamatsu said.

And to make them the best, she pushes, motivates and inspires them. She believes in her students. She demands from them their best.

"That's one of my goals: to help them see themselves as artists with a community obligation."

Neto's Tucson

The corrido is a popular Mexican ballad form of music heard widely on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

For the past nine years the University of Arizona Poetry Center has sponsored the Bilingual Corrido Contest for High School Students. The contest encourages students to explore history and culture through the poetic corrido.

Arizona high-school students in grades 9-12 are invited to write corridos in Spanish and/or English. The deadline to submit them for next year's contest is Feb. 18.

Entries may be submitted by mail or in person to: The University of Arizona Poetry Center, Corrido Contest, 1508 E. Helen St., Tucson, AZ, 85721-0150.