June 20, 2019
Repetition Is Political: On Walking Alone, “I Have a Dream,” and Morgan Parker
In 2016, I attended a weeknight concert at the Showbox in Downtown Seattle that got me thinking about walking as a political act. The headliner that night was riot grrrl […]
May 10, 2017
On Why Poem Titles Matter (Part 1 of 2)
I. Names Poems are not people. They resist qualitative judgments based on their actions or potential—it doesn’t matter that a poem is musical. So is music. Perhaps this is why […]
November 11, 2016
“We need to know how to go about reaching the next days of our lives”
Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” is going around again. W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” is circling through social media, as it did after September 11. Why do we turn to poems […]
May 15, 2015
Writing In and Speaking Out
Earlier this month, in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in police custody and the community unrest and outcry that followed in Baltimore, Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS), […]