As Black History Month eases into its final week, why not use a lesson from the T&W book Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African American Literature to inspire students to write imaginatively?  Among the authors discussed are James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Countee Cullen, Rita Dove, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.

"The extraordinary difficulty of childhood, as I recall it, is making sense of an often contradictory and unpredictable world handed down by adults. Adults offer children maxims meant to buffer and protect, but sometimes these maxims do not help, leaving children with nowhere to vent their frustrations, voice their fears, or solicit other help to decipher an incongruent world. This condition of the child in some ways seems to parallel the experience of African people in the diaspora: that a people taught one set of rules that often does not apply to them, or are made to pledge allegiance to a country that has repeatedly discriminated and alienated them. Because of this there are chants and charms, mantras and prayers to help others regain their balance and move forward. African American poetry disproves the notion that words can't hurt us. While some words hurt and maim and disfigure, other words heal, nourish the soul, salve the will, and strengthen the determination."

-An excerpt from T&W book Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African American Literature, edited by Lorenzo Thomas

For other resources and lessons to motivate student writing, use our Digital Resource Center to search T&W's archives of magazines and lesson plans.