Teachers & Writers Collaborative Celebrates National Poetry Month with the New York Transit Museum

poem-logo_jpegTeachers & 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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A Poem as Big as the City

Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) launched its new project, A Poem as Big as the City, in July. This initiative will engage 6,000-10,000 young people in writing poems about their experiences growing up in the neighborhoods of New York City.

 

The project will culminate in public readings featuring the young poets and well-known New York writers that will be held in all five boroughs, and in the publication of A Poem as Big as the City, a collection of material written during the project.