T223.
In This Together: Teacher-Poets Building Community Within & Beyond the Classroom
Thursday, March 24, 2022
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
Community is integral to a poet’s work, development, and identity. Poets who are K–12 teachers often struggle to access the larger literary community and must find new ways of building support networks and seeking creative opportunities, often doing so through their teaching practice. Five poets discuss how to cultivate strong connections to the larger poetry world while using poetry to foster more caring communities for their students, many of whom carry literary aspirations of their own.
Participants
Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is and two other poetry collections from Sundress Publications, as well as eight chapbooks. She is an associate editor at Rhino Poetry and has recently retired from thirty-six years in public K-8 education.
Leah Umansky is the author of four books of poetry: The Barbarous Century, Don Dreams and I Dream, Straight Away the Emptied World, and Domestic Uncertainties. She earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is the host and curator of the COUPLET Reading Series in New York City.
Ashley M. Jones is the author of Magic City Gospel. She teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is a high school English teacher and author of the chapbooks Teaching While Black and Dust and Ashes and the forthcoming full-length collection The Colored Page. He is also editor in chief of the Weight Journal, an international publication of high school creative writing.
Joan Kwon Glass is the author of Night Swim, winner of the 2021 Diode Editions Book Contest. She has chapbooks forthcoming with Small Harbor Publishing and Milk & Cake Press (spring 2022). She has been a social studies educator in the Connecticut public schools for the past twenty years.
