R236. Maintaining Beginner's Mind in Your Own Classroom: A Poetry Reading

E145, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
Thursday, March 28, 2019
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

 

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” Shunryu Suzuki writes in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “but in the expert’s there are few.” This panel refutes this dichotomy by featuring expert poets at play and inviting the audience to join the fun. Panelists will read poems inspired by prompts they have assigned each other, discussing the prompts as avenues to beginner’s mind. Then the audience will try a prompt on the spot, bringing the rest home for personal or classroom use.


Participants

Moderator:

Amie Whittemore is the author of Glass Harvest and an educator. Her poetry has been recognized with a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize and featured in North American Review, Smartish Pace, Gettysburg Review, the Missouri Review Poem of the Week, and elsewhere.

Mary Biddinger's most recent collection of poems are Small Enterprise and The Czar. A Professor of English at the University of Akron and NEOMFA program, she edits the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron Press. Biddinger is the recipient of a 2015 poetry fellowship from the NEA.

Adrienne Su is the author of four books of poems, most recently Living Quarters. A 2007 NEA fellow, she is the poet in residence at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet, Cave Canem fellow, graduate of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and recipient of three Bread Loaf scholarships. He holds an MFA in poetry from Chicago State University. Keith works as a writer and game designer in Chicago.

Cameron Barnett holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, and is the author of The Drowning Boy's Guide to Water. He teaches middle school language arts in Pittsburgh, PA, and works with various journals and reading series in the city.

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