#THEBOOKCHAT #TeachLivingPoets #aplitchat UNITE! Last week, several Twitter chat groups united to discuss José Olivarez’s new book Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Press, 2018). The chat was moderated by Adrian Nester, Scott Bayer, Joel Garza, and me, and educators and poetry readers from all over the country participated. This post will attempt to curate our chat and share some of the highlights…
Want to #TeachLivingPoets but feel like you don’t know where to start? Or where to find good poems? Then this post is for you. Here, you will find all kinds of resources to help you feel more knowledgeable and comfortable with teaching contemporary poetry in your classroom. How to find poets For a list of poets to follow, click here….
Today’s #TeachLivingPoets post comes from Adrian Nester, educator extraordinaire with 17 years’ experience in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. She is passionate about equity in rural education and the power of Twitter. She currently teaches AP Literature, English 11, and Journalism. She is also a T-ball coach, Interact sponsor, and Sunday school teacher in her spare time. She enjoys traveling, spending time with her…
Today’s post will provide a lesson, inspired by the body, that has students free-writing, reading several mentor text poems, viewing a video performance of a mentor text poem, and finally writing a poem. My students had fun with this lesson, and produced impressive work! In all, it took us about three 50-minute class periods to get through. Another couple of…
Earlier this week, the third installment of the #TeachLivingPoets Twitter chat dropped. The August 28th chat was hosted by Susan Barber, who teaches in Atlanta public schools. Clint Smith’s poem “There Is a Lake Here,” which is the last poem in his collection Counting Descent (Write Bloody, 2016), was our focus as the common text for the chat. There were so many innovative…
Last year, my students read RA Villanueva’s Reliquaria (University of Nebraska Press) and Kaveh Akbar’s chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press) (which I am changing to his full collection for this year, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Alice James Books). New this year in AP Literature will be Safia Elhillo’s The January Children (University of Nebraska Press); and in…
Quick — think of a polysyllabic word that starts with R. How about a word starting with C? Okay, now think of four words in a row (in a phrase that makes sense) that all start with W. This post is all about playing with letters using the Abecedarian form, lipograms, and alliteration poems, along with fun mentor texts by…
End goal: Students will write a poem about or inspired by color. DAY ONE Step 1: Pre-write Activity – Shades of Green Across the top of my front board, I hung a row of sheets of paper of different shades of one color. I got the sheets at my local craft store in the scrap booking section for a dime each. It…
This week, Creative Writing class has been hard at work preparing their performances of their chosen poems for Poetry Out Loud’s school competition. This is the first year my school has entered the competition so it has been an exciting learning experience for all of us. Poetry Out Loud is a national organization, and it is certainly serving as an effective way…
Today, I start my adventures in teaching Creative Writing. And blogging. Basically, blogging about teaching Creative Writing, neither of which I have done before. I requested to teach Creative Writing last year as I started to immerse myself in contemporary poetry. Now willfully drowning, I am grateful to my school for granting my request. I don’t know my students yet–I…