The author is not a visual artist. At best, she can draw a heart. But it stops there. When her middle school students asked her if they could do an art project, she quickly made an excuse. The author had planned out a four-week poetry unit on exploring identity. She had to find the best poems to spark her students' interest and get them motivated to talk and write about who they are, where they are from. At the start of the school's after-school program, the teachers decided their goals would include teaching students how to connect poetry to their living histories and how to use poetry as a means to talk back to the world. Her 90-minute lesson plans were bursting with free writes, reading and critiquing poems, writing poems, revising poems, performing poems--there was no room for art. However, it wasn't until their fourth lesson that she thought of a way to incorporate art in their poetry class. In this article, the author shares how she learned a lot about her students through the self-portraits they created.