Past events
Book Release Party to Celebrate the Publication of
Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community
by Quraysh Ali Lansana & Georgia A. Popoff
DATE
Thursday, Februrary 10, 2011
TIMES
5:30pm – 6:30pm/Reception
6:30pm – 8:30pm/Program
WHERE
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
The University of Illinois at Chicago
800 S. Halsted, Chicago, IL 60607-7017
312-413-5353
WHAT
Lansana and Popoff have spent nearly two decades in classrooms and community-based settings across the country, from K-12 to graduate schools, working with students and teachers in developing best practices for reading and writing poetry as a means to greater understanding of the human experience, cultural diversity, and pop culture, as well as language arts/reading comprehension constructs. The book is intended to support both teachers and teaching artists with the aim to aid them in recognizing the value of poetry as a vehicle to access meaning/inference, cross-curricular applications, acceptance of others, and self identity. With a foreword by Dr. Carol D. Lee (Safisha Madhubuti), the book includes a series of essays that share poignant tales of specific classroom/workshop experiences, effective instructional processes in both reading and creating poetry, and comprehensive lesson plans to support the pedagogy presented throughout the book. It has been 30 years since the last publication of a book suitable for K-12 classrooms that explores poetry as a vehicle for social justice.
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Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of five poetry books, a children's book, and editor of seven anthologies. He is Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University, where he is also Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing. A former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School and a former Reading/Language Arts editor for three of the nation’s largest educational publishers, Lansana has been a literary teaching artist and curriculum developer for two decades.
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Georgia A. Popoff is a poet with two published collections of poetry, a teaching artist, arts-in-education professional development specialist, managing editor of Comstock Review, Downtown Writer’s Center faculty member, and former board member of the Association of Teaching Artists. Georgia is Poet-in-Residence in numerous school districts and teaches adult writing workshops.
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Praise for Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community:
“I dove into Our Difficult Sunlight as a colleague, eager to exercise in the refreshing intelligence and heart of Popoff and Lansana—hoping to discover new teaching approaches, new tools to open up literacy and redress cultural inequity, renewed excitement about the power of art. I got all that and more in the generous, abundant, fierce gifts that fill every page. However, I completed my first swim through their sea renewed as an artist myself, eager to apply my own hand and voice to the fundamental act of making things that matter. After a career spent in developing the field of teaching artistry, I found myself humbled and honored to be considered a colleague of teaching artists who bring mastery of artistic and learning processes together in such a beautiful and effective way.”
—Eric Booth
author of The Music Teaching Artist's Bible and
The Everyday Work of Art, international arts learning consultant
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Please join us on February 10, 2011, as we launch a book five years in the making!!
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This Evening is Co-sponsored by
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Public Square/Illinois Humanities Council
Young Chicago Authors
Guild Complex
Teachers & Writers Collaborative
RSVP
by February 8, 2011
to
Kelly Saulsberry
Project Coordinator/Special Assistant to the Director
ksuzanne@uic.edu
312-355-4683