Yearly Archives: 2012

Last week Melanie Maria Goodreaux read from A Poem as Big as New York City at the Brooklyn Book Festival.  Everyone had a great time! Check out these highlights:

A Poem as Big as New York City is featured in an article on New York Metro Parents.

"The book includes 74 color illustrations...that reflect the playfulness and whimsy of the children’s poetry. Together, images and words dance, jump, and stroll down crowded sidewalks, taking readers from the South Street Seaport to The Apollo Theater and everywhere in between."

Read the whole review here!

Barbara Flug Colin has been selected to receive the 2012 Bechtel Prize for her essay "Now Let's Stare at the Purple." Read more about the prize-winning work here.

A Poem as Big as New York City, the children's book adapted from work written by kids in T&W programs, made the September 9 New York Times. Read the review here!

The fall issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine is now out, featuring excerpts from our new book, A Poem as Big as New York City; exercises and ideas for creating your own community poem project; an interview with writer Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of the newly-released Several Short Sentences About Writing; a look at Houston Writers in the Schools partnership with the Menil Collection, a local art museum; profiles of two longtime Buffalo, NY-based teaching artists; and the following essay by Oregon-based writer Michael Copperman.  We look forward to hearing your responses to the issue!

 A Kid Named A.

by Michael Copperman

A., a tall, thin kid from North Portland, A. of the backward cap and the swaggering slouch, was so confused about his thesis in class that he sat tapping his pencil and shifting in his seat all class long. He needed to identify the reason he felt speech regulations on college campuses should be banned. He wanted to say “freedom of speech” was the reason, and I asked him why freedom of speech was useful to students on college campuses, and he frowned, furrowed his brow, shrugged and then stared down at what he had written as if the words might appear on the page through sheer intensity of stare. 

After class, he lingered at the front of the classroom and asked again, “What should I say?” “What you think is right and makes sense,” I told him, and despite his persistence, I would not give him “the answer.” That attitude of “just tell me” is common among even the better students who make it to college out of our overcrowded and under-resourced public schools: they care about doing well, but have rarely been asked to figure things out themselves, let alone had their own opinions valued and evaluated on clarity and merit. We went in circles, and finally he stood with his hands at his sides in despair. (more...)

A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY is a delightful book-length poem that spreads the wonder and joy that is New York, as told through the words of its young people. Lyrical, heartfelt, and bursting with imagination, A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY proves that a poem can be as vast and exciting as the greatest city in the world.

Check out an early review of the book.

Purchase A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY directly from Rizzoli, New York. Also available from Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

Find out more about A Poem as Big as New York City here.

T&W is looking for interns for the 2012-2013 school year. Take a look at the intern job description here, help spread the word, or apply yourself.

Beat the heat this August!  Attend a FREE T&W poetry workshop at your local NYC library!

With generous support from The Lily Auchincloss Foundation and The Lotos Foundation, T&W is partnering with the Brooklyn Public Library, the New York Public Library, and the Queens Library to offer free poetry workshops based on our 2008 A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY project.

Through this initiative, thousands of young people in NYC schools and community centers took part in workshops in which they wrote poems about their experiences growing up in New York, imagining the city as its own poem character. The poems created were adapted into a single narrative by T&W writer Melanie Maria Goodreaux, A Poem as Big as New York City, which Universe (an imprint of Rizzoli) will publish as a hard-cover, illustrated children’s book in fall 2012. 

Our FREE one-hour poetry workshops will be held in select library branches on the following dates and times during August.  Come pay poetic tribute to our beloved city!

School has been out for a month but T&W writers are still at work this summer in New York’s public libraries. From Coney Island, Brooklyn, to Castle Hill in the Bronx, poetry workshops based around T&W’s 2008 A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY project are fully underway.

As a summer intern for T&W I attended two hour-long workshops led by seasoned T&W playwright and teaching artist Frank Ingrasciotta at the Dyker Library branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Upon my first visit (which was Frank’s first workshop at the library), eight participants, some of whom are part of Dyker branch's "Teen Time," silently waited as Frank wrote his name on the small easel. Blank expressions were their only response. Reaching for the book Alphabet City, Frank told the participants that today they’d be using their spatial-reasoning skills. Alphabet City is an abstract picture book that explores the alphabet by identifying individual letters found in various urban objects. For example, the profile of a wooden-horse forms the letter "A," a fire escape forms the letter "Z," or if you rotate the book, it might be a capital "N." Frank flipped through the book, asking what letters the students could spot. The group was polite and reserved, raising their hands and patiently waiting to be called on to speak. Despite their initial restraint, gasps and smiles broke the silence as the objects became more abstract, and identifying a letter more like revealing a secret.  (more...)

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way that has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

-Ernest Hemingway from T&W book Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing