March 16, 2017
Designing Women on Writing (and Teaching)
Growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, I sort of thought that I would be a preacher, a plastic surgeon, or a Supreme Court Justice. All of these were concessions, though, after […]
March 13, 2017
I Turned Off News Notifications and Realized the Importance of the Humanities
Just after the winter break in 2012, when I was teaching English at Indian Springs School in Alabama, I had a new student join my class. The social and political […]
October 14, 2016
Poetry and Leadership: Part I
This post is an adaptation of a talk I gave at last weekend’s Imagining America National Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The medium of poetry is language—not some alternate language to that […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
November 9, 2015
Pt 2 – A Conversation with Mike Rose
The first interview in a series of conversations with writer-educators on the intersections between writing, teaching, and identity PART 2 OF 2 (Click here to read Pt 1) Mike Rose […]
November 2, 2015
A Conversation with Mike Rose – PT I
The first interview in a series about the intersections of writing, teaching, & identity Mike Rose is the son of working class Italian-immigrant parents who settled in South Los Angeles in […]
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 […]