On the Frontlines/School Matters: K-12 Teachers Writing the Classroom

Panelists: Mahru Elahi, Marguerite Sheffer, Brittany Rogers, Matthew E. Henry, and Davon Loeb

Panel Description:

In-person event At a time when public educators are increasingly under political pressure, panelists will explore what it means to portray complex truths, dispel myths, and talk honestly about how to stay creative within top-down school systems as they find form and language for their experience with youth in the classroom. This multiracial and geographically diverse panel centers writers, editors and activists who put their K-12 classroom experience in conversation with their writing across multiple genres.

I will be a part of a panel at the Roxbury Poetry Festival with Quintin Collins, Imani Davis, and Sarah Kersey entitled Culture as Container: How Identities Serve as Forms for Writing

Identity and ancestry can create recurring signatures in writing. Plot lines, images, and other craft elements take on some unique approaches, creating containers that the writers find themselves within or rail against from piece to piece. Four writers will read from their poetry and discuss how their cultural backgrounds serve as forms for their work, highlighting specific craft elements in their own work and work of their kin writers, as well as distinct aspects of craft that they see as originating from within their communities. 

Copies will be for sale (and signing) at the launch, but you can buy yours in advance here.

My talk: Reclaiming Exile

The stark shift in the literary traditions from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament limited the “acceptable” responses to the pain of exile—the expulsion from a grounding place, people, principle, and/or pathos. What one was “allowed” to say in the Hebrew Bible about suffering was largely silenced in the New Testament, and this has largely carried on throughout much of the Christian tradition. This talk will examine how this happened and attempt to reclaim the authentic voices of the oppressed in past and the present, the voices and perspectives on suffering that are often repressed within the modern Christian sensibility.

I’ll also have a reading from my forthcoming collection The Third Renunciation

Poet Jimmy Pappas is leading an interactive, group conversation about my poetry via Zoom. The topic of conversation is “teaching while Black.”

Visiting Dr. Bunkong Tuon's Black Lives Matter Poetry Class to read and discuss the Colored page.

Writers Read, sponsored by the Language and Literature Department, is a special event featuring authors who read from and comment on their work.

Presenting "Where Do We Go From Here?" ~ An exploration of the racism and redemption found in Numbers 12 with poetic interludes. What can we learn from these ancient and modern texts about where we focus our quest for justice?