Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry

(Hardback)

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This one-of-a-kind mixture of essays, interviews, and lesson plans gathers the best thinking about how we can impart the value and joy of poetry to kids.
The essays in the first sectionfrom Matthea Harvey, Ron Padgett, William Stafford, Eileen Myles, Kenneth Koch, Theodore Roethke, and many othersilluminate the importance of poetry to a well-rounded education, in and out of traditional classroom settings. The next section is a roundtable conversation among a handful of creative men and women whove helped set up or run poetry education centers around the United States. In the books final segment, award-winning poets (Matthew Zapruder, Yusef Komunyakaa, many others) offer an array of brilliant lesson plans for people teaching poetry to kids of all ages.
Open the Door will be useful for first-time and veteran teachers, as well as parents, babysitters, MFAs with no job, and anyone else with an interest in poetrys place in the lives of our younger citizens.

Reviews

"Worried you don't know how to teach poetry Frustrated that your students groan at the sight of a poem Open the Door will change all that. The writers not only give teachers permission to approach the teaching of poetry through a fresh portal; they also provide clear directions for finding that elusive door in the wall. This is a GPS for both the poetically challenged and anyone in search of new word horizons." --Carol Jago,past president, National Council of Teachers of English "An invaluable resource." --Publishers Weekly (Starred review)

Author Bio

Dorothea Lasky is the author of three poetry collections, AWE, Black Life, and the forthcoming Thunderbird, all published by Wave. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and she holds a doctorate in Creativity and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in New York City. Dominic Luxford is the editor of The McSweeneys Book of Poets Picking Poets (McSweeneys, 2007), the founding poetry editor of the Believer magazine, and a founding editor of the McSweeneys Poetry Series. For several years he tutored elementary school student for the H.E.A.R.T. program in Portland, Oregon. He lives in San Francisco. Jesse Nathan is a founding editor of the McSweeneys Poetry Series. He served as managing editor of The Best American Nonrequired Reading from 2009 to 2011 and lives south of San Francisco, where he edits books for McSweeneys, writes poems, and works on a PhD in English Literature at Stanford. Series Editor: Ilya Kaminsky is the Director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute at the Poetry Foundation. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa, and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.