This dissertation documents the experiences and interactions of fifteen TESOL graduate students in a poetry writing course where they dedicated themselves to studying, writing, critiquing, and revising poetry. Moving away from traditional second language (L2) pedagogies in East Asian EFL (English as Foreign Language) contexts that prioritize scientific knowledge of L2 acquisition over creative practices, this study examines the possible contributions poetry-based learning made toward the construction of participants TESOL teacher identity as artists and its implications for L2 learning and teaching. To lay a solid theoretical groundwork, this dissertation reviews the central ideas of Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory (SCT) such as mediation, regulation, internalization, and zone of proximal development, discusses their relation to the understanding of the roles of creative collaboration in L2 learning and development, and integrates the sociocultural understanding of literacy, such as literacy as social practice, multiliteracies, and critical literacy with the potential of poetry-based learning. Through an in-depth analysis of students poems, questionnaires, interviews, and classroom discourse recorded during poetry revision workshops, this study reveals that 1) international students engaged in poetry writing as a process to reveal their personal voice, integrating their daily experiences in a new school context and in adapting to a new country and culture. 2) Poetry revision workshops served as Poetic ZPD in that it facilitated creative (l)imitation (Cahnmann-Taylor & Hwang, 2015) which enhanced participants identities as connected to and expanding from past structures, thus yielding new future selves, symmetrical scaffolding for shared thinking and learning, and dialogic collaboration for reflection and revision where creative meaning-making occurred for both teacher and student alike. 3) The experience of poetry writing illuminated the possibility of shaping TESOL teachers identities through the metaphor of poet-teachers, viewing L2 instruction as creative, unscripted, concise, communicative, and cultural teaching. Based on these findings, this dissertation sheds new light on the power of arts-based instruction to see L2 acquisition as both art and science, as both process and product and further suggests the arts can serve as meaningful L2 teaching tool to help students grow as creative and collaborative meaning-makers, not just passive receptors of language form.