Teach This Poem
A Workshop for Educators
With Richard Blanco
Engaging students through poetry is a powerful and substantive way to heighten their cultural and societal awareness and responsiveness in a multitude of contexts. However, poetry instruction can often be a real challenge because of outdated and misunderstood notions about the art form. Indeed, the fear of poetry is pervasive enough to have merited its own term: metrophobia.
As an antidote to that phobia and to revitalize poetry’s role in the classroom, Richard Blanco will offer a discussion and interactive workshop meant to empower educators with easier and more effective ways to bring poetry and art into the classroom. Using a method based on the Teach This Poem activity series from the Academy of American Poets, where Blanco serves as Education Ambassador, teachers will learn to harness the power of poetry to engage various matters, including the social and political.This two-part virtual workshop is for educators of all grade levels, subjects, and backgrounds looking for new and innovative ways to invite poetry into their teaching. In the first session (2-hours), Blanco will offer detailed instruction, equipping participants with the methodology and tools necessary to create their own Teach This Poem activity on their own over the following two weeks. In the second session (2.5-hours), Blanco will facilitate a discussion with participants about their experiences, questions, and struggles as regards to the development of these activities. In doing so, attendees will collectively workshop and refine their approach to poetry instruction, all while under the guidance of the fifth U.S. Presidential Inaugural Poet.
Both sessions will be recorded; recordings will be available to participants until June 1, 2025. Participants will be part of a Zoom Meeting with Richard Blanco, which means everyone will have the option to turn cameras on (although that is not required to participate). By joining the class, participants consent to being recorded (only if they opt to turn their camera on). As noted above, recordings will be available to class participants only for a limited time; recordings will not be shared for any other purpose.
While this class is designed as a participatory workshop, it can be purchased to be viewed asynchronously (not live) for a similar experience.
DETAILS
Teach This Poem with Richard Blanco: A Workshop for Educators
(2 Zoom classes to attend in person or watch later)
Dates
Session 1: Sunday, April 13, 2025
Session 2: Sunday, April 27, 2025
Time
Session 1: 12:00-2:00 PM ET
Session 2: 12:00-2:30 PM ET
Cost
$200 USD*
*Class will be capped at 36 participants.
“An engineer, poet, Cuban American…his poetry bridges cultures and languages—a mosaic of our past, our present, and our future—reflecting a nation that is hectic, colorful, and still becoming.”
—President Joe Biden, conferring the National Humanities Medal on Richard Blanco, 2023
Richard Blanco
Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs For All Of Us: One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir.
Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County and in 2023, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities.