It started out with a curve ball. And that was before the table flipped. When I head to the South Bronx each year to lead a poetry workshop at St. Luke School, I expect that I'll teach the 7th and then 8th grades. The classrooms are right next to each other, I know...
News
Mommy, Why Are They Marching? Six Picture Books for kids
Our children are asking. How do we respond when a man about to be inaugurated as President of the United States would flunk the behavior guidelines of every kindergarten in the country: no name-calling, no touching someone else’s private parts? When the election was...
Gratitude in Troubled Times: a letter-writing project
I found a way out of my post-election miasma: writing letters. Read my essay about gratitude letters here on Medium.
Searching for My Sidekick, and finding him
Searching for My Sidekick: I wrote that essay three years ago, as I remembered my childhood friend Wilfredo on his October 12 birthday. I'd recently learned that he had died, and I had an unsettled feeling, wondering about the circumstances of his death at age 34....
Writing Buzz: Autumn may be the best season for writing!
There is nothing like that clean-page feeling of fall! I have been energetically contributing to blogs, writing articles, and revising my middle grade novel ever since I turned that page to September. A few links: My article "Coming Out to My College Students--Again"...
Talking about summer reading on NPR!
Getting an invitation to talk about children's books and summer? No way I'd turn that down! I had the chance to join host Mindy Todd and Falmouth librarian Jill Erickson at WCAI-FM (Cape and Islands NPR station) recently, and we talked about so. many. books! The topic...
Radio interview: Instilling a love of reading in children
"Never the leave the house without a book." That's one of the tips we discussed yesterday on The Point, a morning program on WCAI-FM, the NPR station for Cape Cod and the Islands. Host Mindy Todd and I discussed how to instill a love of reading in the home, creating...
Raising a Reader: my class for parents/early educators!
Raising a Reader! I'm offering this community education class in May 2016 at the Cape Cod Campus of Bridgewater State University. Raising a Reader is a non-credit course aimed at parents and caregivers who want to infuse a love of reading and books into their...
Running in Flip Flops
Poetry on the radio-- it's a perfect match. A poem can lift the spirits and light the way as we go about our day. My poem "Running in Flips Flops" was recently featured on our local NPR station's Poetry Sunday series. WCAI-FM (Cape and Islands NPR) includes a local...
A Prison Writing Class using Children’s Books
Get people talking about the books they remember as children, and all sorts of things happen. The voice softens. There is laughter. The eyes look beyond, beyond the room to another place, another time. That’s what happened in the first session of my creative writing...