November 15, 2017
Christopher Soto on the June Jordan Teaching Corp
DM: Dr. Joshua Bennett and The Center for Justice at Columbia University have invited you to teach a community-based writing workshop that serves both the Columbia University student body and also members […]
August 8, 2017
An Interview with Poet, Teacher, and Activist Jimmy Santiago Baca
by Kirsten Ogden This is the third interview in a series about the intersections of writing, teaching, and identity. Read Past Interviews in the series: Mike Rose, Virginia Pye. Jimmy Santiago Baca […]
February 24, 2017
The Game
“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster…when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” – […]
July 21, 2016
Histories of Our Faces
I recently returned home from teaching for two weeks in the Between the Lines program at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in Iowa City. The session in which I taught […]
May 21, 2016
The joy that has no stem nor core
The joy that has no stem nor core, Nor seed that we can sow, Is edible to longing, But ablative to show. By fundamental palates Those products are preferred Impregnable […]
May 13, 2016
Seeing Stars: Visualizing Poetry in the Classroom
At this risk of sounding like I’m quoting a line cut from The Sound of Music: how do you hold a semester’s worth of poetic reading in mind at the end of […]
April 29, 2016
Zach Savich & Adam Clay: In Conversation
During March 2016, Zach Savich and Adam Clay (a former and current editor at the Kenyon Review, respectively) discussed their new books, The Orchard Green and Every Color (Omnidawn, 2016) and Stranger […]
February 2, 2016
“And since I’m the one writing it . . .”
After Saturday’s orientation, Monday evening was the first official joint meeting of Writers in Baltimore Schools high school students and Johns Hopkins University undergrads collaborating on the Community-Based Learning course “Poetry & […]
January 31, 2016
Crossing That Line
Yesterday afternoon was a day I’d been anticipating for almost a year — the high school students’ orientation for the joint Writers in Baltimore Schools and Johns Hopkins University Writing […]
January 22, 2016
Of Late: Procrastination and Poetry
There has to be a word for the very special kind of procrastination that goes into planning a poetry course. I certainly engage in the regular kind of procrastination with […]
October 23, 2015
Gwendolyn Brooks & a Poetry of Collective Self
One of the best-known poems in the first-person plural is probably “We Real Cool,” by Gwendolyn Brooks, which first appeared in Poetry in September 1959, and was then published in her 1960 […]
September 27, 2015
Love Letter to a Textbook: Structure & Surprise
There should be a perfect German compound word for the particular sustained balance of elation and relief a teacher feels when teaching from a new-to-you textbook that just works. Someday, perhaps, I’ll […]