Teaching Writing Through Poetry

Poetry is experiencing a cultural renaissance in the United States, capturing attention in ways not seen since the days of Robert Frost and Rod McKuen. With Amanda Gorman’s rise to fame and Rupi Kaur drawing stadium-sized crowds, students are engaging with poetry on social media and discovering it as an accessible and expressive art form. Teaching Writing through Poetry, the 2nd book in a new series on Teaching Writing meets this moment by offering a structural approach that demystifies poetic form and illustrates how poems make rhetorical demands through formal choices. Designed for both seasoned poetry lovers and hesitant beginners, the book provides clear, practical guides for reading and writing poems. It helps students move beyond the misconception that poetry is simply unshaped emotional expression and instead equips them to appreciate and create poetry with intention and craft.

Series;
This series for K-12 and collegiate writing and English teachers, educators, curriculum specialists, and preservice teacher education candidates provides methods, pedagogy and practical exercises in the teaching of writing.

Books in the series explore the vast array of ideas, strategies and topics that actively engage students in developing skills that will help them become better writers, critical readers and critical thinkers. These fresh methodologies will expand students’ ideas on what writing means, as well as what learning can mean. Various approaches in the series will rejuvenate instructors and feed educators’ own desires as lifelong learners.

Each book is meant to make the educators lives both easier and more fulfilling, as the texts in this series include a plethora of writing exercises, prompts and approaches. Many titles will benefit educators from various disciplines who are interested in implementing more writing into their curriculum.

Jason Schneiderman has taught creative writing and lectured on poetry for over twenty years. He is the author of five books of poetry as well as the forthcoming essay collection Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture. For many years, he wrote a column for Teachers and Writers on teaching poetic form. He is Professor of English at the City University of New Yorks’s Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Adept at working with novices and experts, Schneiderman’s approach creates shared knowledge and community within any classroom.

Jason’s love of teaching has brought him into many settings outside of the university. He has taught in elementary schools, summer camps, and community based programs. He has been a visiting writer at high schools and colleges across the country, and has worked with both college and high school faculty on successfully integrating writing in their pedagogy. As guest host of The Slowdown, and longtime cohost of Painted Bride Quarterly, his voice has brought both poetry and his understanding of poetry to thousands of listeners.

He has received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, The Fulbright Foundation, and the Poetry Society of America.