Many WITS groups across the country celebrate April as National Poetry Month. Follow these links to find out all about it:
Many of the projects for National Poetry Month are online so you can participate, no matter where you live.
Badgerdog at Round Top
On Friday, April 17, as part of National Poetry Month, Badgerdog will once again partner with the Poetry at Round Top Festival. Students from Ojeda Junior High, Del Valle Junior High, Del Valle Opportunity Center and Del Valle High School will spend the day at the International Festival Institute at Round Top, where they will take part in poetry writing and performance workshops with award-winning authors Jeff Stumpo and Jenny Browne. Badgerdog instructors, along with English teachers from all four schools, will participate in a morning workshop with renowned poet and University of Texas professor Dean Young.
Founded in 1971, the International Festival Institute hosts exceptional year-round education and performance programs. This is the second year Badgerdog has partnered with the Poetry at Round Top Festival. To read more about the International Festival Institute, please click here. To sign up for the Poetry Festival click here.
Happy Poetry Month from The WITS Alliance
Most members of the WITS Alliance are celebrating National Poetry Month in exciting ways. Please explore their websites using the blogroll to the right.
Teachers & Writers Collaborative Celebrates National Poetry Month with the New York Transit Museum
Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) and the New York Transit Museum will celebrate National Poetry Month with a public reading and writing event to be held at Museum on Sunday, April 26, at 2 PM. The event will feature a reading by award-winning poet Vijay Seshadri and students from the Magnet School for Science and Technology (K154) in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The event will also include a writing activity led by T&W writer Matthew Burgess, an experienced T&W teaching artist.
The celebration at the Transit Museum will mark National Poetry Month and is also part of T&W’s citywide poetry project, A Poem as Big as the City. Launched in 2008, A Poem as Big as the City is a special project for which thousands of young people across the city are working with T&W writers to write poems about their experiences growing up in New York City. As part of A Poem as Big as the City, T&W will publish selected youth poetry in a book to be nationally distributed and will feature selected youth poets in public readings with well-known New York writers.
The event at the New York Transit Museum during National Poetry Month will be the first of these readings. The event will showcase the literary talents of young Brooklynites attending PS 154K and will feature poet Vijay Seshadri, who has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His poetry collections include Wild Kingdom and James Laughlin Award winner The Long Meadow, and his writing has appeared in The American Scholar, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. Seshadri currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives with his family in Brooklyn.
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