a blog post by Laura Yoo

It was my very first visit to the famous Dodge Poetry Festival.  It was Saturday, October 22^nd in 2016, right around 7:15 in the evening. There stood on this enormous stage at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center a petite Asian woman, speaking with a slight accent and a lot of voice.  She read her poem, “One Child Has Brown Eyes.” First I googled “vacuity.” Then, I was mesmerized. Also on stage were poets like Martin Espada, Robert Haas, Claudia Rankine, and Jane Hirshfield, but it was Marilyn Chin who spoke to me that night.  She was smart, powerful, and funny – and she looked like me.

Ever since getting a serious high on Macbeth in high school, I’ve been studying and loving English literature. In college, I chose all of my electives to be in English literature, and I studied abroad in England to nerd it up with Shakespeare and Jane Austen – and to drink a lot of beer. My area of study was eighteenth-century British literature (which even other English majors didn’t want to touch) so I can say for sure there were no likes of Marilyn Chin in my curriculum. In the last 10 years, thanks to HoCoPoLitSo, I’ve met many wonderful writers and poets, and among them a few Asian American writers, too.  But the poet embodied and represented by Marilyn Chin was something new for me.

See, I always wanted to be like Sandra Oh’s character in Grey’s Anatomy, someone who wasn’t on the show to play Asian. She was just another doctor, who happened to be Asian.  Her name wasn’t Johnson or Smith. Her name was Cristina Yang, best friend to the main character, but the “Yang” part did not define her character.  Sandra Oh, who is Korean-Canadian, plays this “best friend” role also in Sideways and Under the Tuscan Sun. In both of these movies, she is just the best friend, not the Asian best friend.  I applauded these characters. Yes! Finally! Asian people are just people! In retrospect, however, I am seeing that in some ways this is denial, a kind of self-imposed erasure. Yes, it hurts to be locked inside the limits of stereotypes, but it also hurts to deny my self from myself in an apparent fight against such stereotypes. At this point, I can hear a frustrated voice saying to me, “What do you want, then? You want Cristina Yang to be Korean or not?” Well, I think I want Cristina Yang to be her self, all of the things that she is.

Recently a Korean-American writer, Mary H.K. Choi, posted this:

From this post, I suspect that, like me, Ms. Choi has been struggling – maybe unbeknownst to her – with her relationship to the Korean part of her “Korean-American” identity. So, I have been thinking about my own going home (or coming home) and how art helps me on that journey. A great example of such art is Ms. Chin’s novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, which Sandra Cisneros called “bad ass,” Maxine Hong Kingston “What fun!” and Gish Jen “Deeply provocative and deeply Chinese.” The story of two Chinese girls growing up in California focuses very much on their grandmother’s voice and legacy, weaving 41 separate stories together into what Ms. Chin calls a “manifesto.”  The story is magical, mythical, and yet so very painfully and beautifully real. The opening story is heartbreaking, shocking, and ultimately triumphant.

Ms. Chin’s poem, “How I Got My Name: An Essay on Assimilation,”  is another good example.  It starts like this:

I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin

Oh, how I love the resoluteness

of that first person singular

followed by that stalwart indicative

of “be,” without the uncertain i-n-g

of “becoming.” Of course,

the name had been changed

somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,

when my father the paperson

in the late 1950s

obsessed with a bombshell blond

transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.”

And nobody dared question

his initial impulse—for we all know

lust drove men to greatness,

not goodness, not decency.

And there I was, a wayward pink baby,

named after some tragic white woman

swollen with gin and Nembutal.

My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL93vVOuE8Y

The assimilation happens with the choosing of an “American name.”  I am also named after a white woman, Laura Ingalls Wilder, but more accurately the character Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie the TV show.  My mom had watched this show in Korea and loved the character. This custom is seen as practical as it is difficult for Americans to pronounce Korean names. Luckily, my family – like most Korean people – also could not pronounce the “r” and has always called me Yoonji, by my real name.  Now, my little sons hear my mom calling me Yoonji and once in awhile, very quietly, they test it out in a kind of whisper “Yoonji” and then giggle.  It’s like they’re wondering, “Who is this Yoonji? She’s like a whole another person from my mom who is Laura.” Maybe so. Maybe not.  All of this, of course, is not to deny the name Laura, which my mom gave me and therefore an important part of my identity.  Besides, it’s a beautiful name.  But it’s complicated, you see.

I know it sounds cliche to say this, but Ms. Chin’s poetry, novel, and her performances have raised my awareness.  No, it did not happen like a bolt of lightning or anything that dramatic, but rather like a gradual stewing and simmering in this idea about who I am and what I am. So, on this International Women’s Day, I want to thank her for being on that stage on that day at Dodge Poetry Festival to help me widen the way I might think about my cultural identities.

I am ecstatic that I will have another chance to meet Ms. Chin and maybe – if I have the guts – thank her in person on April 26th when she reads at the Blackbird Poetry Festival at Howard Community College. Read more about Marilyn Chin’s visit here.

Laura Yoo
HoCoPoLitSo Board member and Professor of English at Howard Community College.

Laura Yoo
HoCoPoLitSo Board member and Professor of English at Howard Community College.

A blog post by Laura Yoo

I did not grow up with Dr. Seuss because by the time I came to the United States from Korea, I was already 10 years old and my parents certainly didn’t know who Dr. Seuss was.  That’s right. I had a Seuss-less childhood.

It was when I was in high school and doing a lot of babysitting that I came across Dr. Seuss. The children just loved his books, almost as much as they enjoyed watching Disney movies. I learned quickly that Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham were some of the kids’ favorites. As a 15 year old, I didn’t see the real value of these books, of course.  They were just fun.

Now as a mom to young children, a teacher of writing, and a human fascinated by language and literature, I have a whole new appreciation for Dr. Seuss. Hop on Pop, The Lorax, The Cat in the Hat, and Green Eggs and Ham are probably some of the most popular of Dr. Seuss’s books. My own two boys say Fox in Socks and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish are their two favorites.

While all these are wonderful stories, my personal favorite is Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book. This is the book that truly showcases Dr. Seuss’s genius.

Oh boy, does it work. Try to stifle the yawn while you read it. You can’t do it. At least half way through, someone – you or one of the little listeners – will yawn. And once that first yawn comes out, there’s no stopping the flood of yawns to come. As Dr. Seuss says: “A yawn is quite catching, you see. Like a cough.” Turns out – just reading the word “yawn” or seeing illustrations of creatures yawning will make you yawn. That’s how powerful a yawn is.

So, by the time you reach the end of the book to read “When you put out your light, / Then the number will be / Ninety-nine zillion / Nine trillion and three” I swear the little ones look sleepy – and I am also sleepy.

And this is one of the many magical powers of Dr. Seuss.  Yes, the silly names, the nonsense words, and the insane rhymes are so fun to read. Yes, the books have valuable life lessons.  In addition to all that, it will help your kids go to sleep.  Now, if he had just written a book called Dr. Seuss’s Clean Up Your Room Book…

Happy Dr. Seuss Day!

Laura Yoo
HoCoPoLitSo Board member and Professor of English at Howard Community College.

Today – September 6th – is National Read a Book Day.  And on this occasion, I’m sharing with you 30 books that changed me.

These are the books that exposed me to new things (like about racial passing in Nella Larsen’s Passing), changed the way I felt about a subject or what I knew about the subject (like about death and dying in Ann Lamott’s Hard Laughter), or seemed to push the conventions of literature (like the way Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy experiments with structure and narrative voice).  These are the books that made me say, “What? A book a can do THAT?!?!”

For most of these works, though, I don’t remember the exact plot or the details that made them so impressive.  For some of these books, I bet the timing was what mattered. When I read Crime and Punishment, for example, it was right after high school. And I read it for fun. I think I was pretty proud of myself for reading a Dostoevsky for leisure. That made me an official adult.

Though I don’t remember the details, I remember the sensation.  I remember the sense of awe inspired by Waiting for Godot and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. These books blew me away with their deep investigations of humans – about who we are, what we want, what we believe, what we lack, and what we could be (both beautiful and hideous).

I remember feeling very grown up after reading books like The Laramie Project and Middlesex. These books introduced me to the things that happen in the world to real people that I might otherwise have been shielded from.

I remember feeling envious when reading works like Playing in the Dark and Between the World and Me. These are the books that showed me what a human mind can think through and what a human mind can then articulate into language. The envy comes from recognizing these writers’ genius as well as the fact that I will never achieve that.

I remember the labor that went into studying Paradise Lost and Macbeth. So much to excavate and discover – again and again – in pouring over works like those.  And the sense of accomplishment that comes from cracking the code in some small way to understand the text.

I also remember specific lines from these books that stay with me.  Like “There is no story that is not true” from Thing Fall Apart. Like “A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe” from The Things They Carried. And these unforgettable words: “Let me imagine … what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith, let us say” from A Room of One’s Own – and I never forgot about Judith Shakespeare.

Oh, and of course – I remember the laughing and the crying.  Really laughing out loud while reading Me Talk Pretty One Day.  And really sobbing while reading The Kite Runner.

My literature students are writing this week about why we read and study literature. As for me, I read because I want to be changed. Even in some small way. By the time I read the last page of the book I want to feel a little different and be a little better than when I started the book.

Why do you read?

Laura Yoo is a HoCoPoLitSo Board member and Associate Professor of English at Howard Community College.

This is a story of a prodigal daughter.

At the beginning of the summer, I made big plans.  A long list of books I wanted to read.  Big goals.  Ambitious.  I would read, read, and read some more. I had books to read. And I had the time to read them.

Instead, all through July and August, I watched TV.  A lot of it. Game of Thrones, Orange is the New Black, Stranger Things, Master Chef, and endless episodes of Chopped.  And all these hours that were committed to watching means I haven’t been reading.  There is the still-not-finished Fates and Furies on my night stand. I’m about 50 pages into Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman. Though Pride and Prejudice and Zombies intrigued me at the bookstore, I haven’t even opened it yet. Though I made good progress on Claudia Rankin’s Citizen: An American Lyric, it is not finished. (Though, you might argue, one simply does not plow through a work like Citizen.)

This summer, the room we call the “reading room” in my house was used to get away from the children to watch stuff on Netflix on my tablet with earphones shoved into my ears.

I am ashamed. Fail. Major fail.

So, clearly, I needed help.

And help came on September 13th in the form of a very wild Wilde Reading.  Organized by Laura Shovan, Ann Bracken, and LindaJoy Burke, Wilde Readings launched its first open mic night with featured readers Jen Grow and Le Hinton. An audience of about 30 gathered in one of the art studio spaces at the Columbia Art Center, the same space where my son had art summer camp. It was comfortable, friendly, and intimate.

As Laura told us, though there are many wonderful literary organizations, publications, and events in Howard County, a place for writers to come together and share freely and informally had been lacking for many years.  And Wilde Reading’s inaugural event demonstrated the very reason such gatherings are needed: it created a collage of unique, diverse literary voices.  Each time a reader went up to the podium, you just didn’t know what you were gonna get.

Jen Grow’s short story about a daughter and her dying mother just about killed me. Before she read, Jen promised to go for the jugular – her words – and she didn’t miss.  I was relieved and astonished at the same time when Jen ended by reassuring us that her mother is still living, that the story is indeed fictional.  I thought, how can one create a story like that – so moving, so real, and so visceral – without actually having lived it?  Even if one had experienced it, telling it in such a powerful way would be a difficult task.  I suppose that’s why poets are artists, creators.

Le Hinton’s reading was enhanced by a tactile experience he created for the audience.  He passed around cotton blooms for us to feel between our fingers while he read his poems on the motif of cotton.  When he read an autobiographical poem about doing math lessons with his father, he passed around Tootsie Rolls for us to enjoy.  The taste of chocolate in our mouths transported us to that room with that little boy, his father, math lessons, and Tootsie Rolls for reward.

The open mic readers included Jan Bowman and Michael Ratcliffe, two writers who will be featured in future Wilde Reading events. The open mic evening ended with a powerful performance by Analysis the Poet.

While the voices of the evening were divergent and their subject matter so varied, together these writer-performers created a one-of-kind literary sound.  And that sound, that experience can never be recreated again.  I feel lucky to have been there to witness it.

This Wilde Reading invited me back to the written word.  It pushed me around a bit – from one emotion to another and yet another – and left me wanting more.  And more I shall get – on October 4th with Jan Bowman and Derrick Weston Brown as featured readers at the second Wilde Reading.

Inspired by this Wilde Reading, I did something different today. During my son’s 45-minute swim practice, instead of browsing my Facebook page or taking quizzes on Buzzfeed, I opened a book: Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist.  And I’m in love with the written word again.

Thank you, Wilde, for welcoming back this prodigal daughter.

During my last visit to Antique Depot in Old Ellicott City (if you’ve been reading this blog, you know I LOVE this place), I picked up several paperback copies of Agatha Christie’s mysteries.

My memories of reading Agatha Christie are also memories of growing up. On my parents’ bookshelves, I found Korean novels, histories, and poetry.  But also there were the classics like Dostoevsky and Don Quixote as well as detective novels by Agatha Christie and thrillers by Sidney Sheldon.  All in Korean.  In middle school, I read my first Christie, And Then There Were None, in Korean.

So it was with a bit of nostalgia that I began reading The Secret of Chimneys, one of my finds at Antique Depot.  Right away I noticed in her writing something dramatically different from the mystery novels of today. Novels like Girl on the Train and Gone Girl which were wildly popular recently (and made into movies) have character development (some better than others) and complicated plot twists, a mix of whodunit and exploration of various themes. Compared to these, Christie’s mystery seemed rather… plain.  Instead of sex, drugs, infidelity, violence, and blood, we find witty dialogue and a slow building of a puzzle.

Jean Sonntag with her husband Bill at Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, in the Berkshires.

This re-introduction to Christie made me want to learn more about the mystery genre, so I turned to my friend Jean Sonntag with some questions. Jean is an adjunct instructor of English at Howard Community College as well as a mystery enthusiast.  Here’s what she had to say about Christie and the development of the mystery genre.

Laura: How would you describe Christie’s kind of mystery-telling and our contemporary mystery-telling?

Jean: There is a huge difference. The key thing is the emphasis in Christie on solving a puzzle to the subordination of characterization, psychological analysis, or any larger themes.  Christie was part of a group called The Detection Club who had a quite elaborate set of rules for writers of detective stories in the 30’s. In short, everything should be there so the reader could solve the puzzle. Writers, of course, violated these rules at times. The tradition of ratiocination (Poe’s word) and very often an eccentric detective were part of the development of this 30’s Golden Age and Christie fits this tradition, particularly with Hercule Poirot. 

Today’s detective story leaves room for more in-depth characterization and is minus the formulaic considerations of the detective stories of Christie’s era.  Thus, someone like Elizabeth George’s Inspector Thomas Lynley and P.D. James’ Adam Dalgleish have a history that unfolds throughout the works while they are solving crimes committed by complex characters in complex situations. The modern detective story tends to be longer, more in depth, with more sophisticated style in many cases.  And some have themes; P.D. James has pointed out that she sets out to write a detective story as any one would a novel, where the plot is a natural outgrowth of plot and setting. 

Laura: Beyond the experience of thrill or curiosity, what do you think draws people to mysteries like Christie’s?

Jean: Reading Christie is a thinking (not feeling) exercise.  Her works are not exceptionally long and her style is relatively simple, with pretty good dialogue.  Those attracted to puzzle solving or who are reading strictly for entertainment love her.  All of us have times we’d like to read like that – consider that layover in an airport or the need for pure escape. Interestingly enough, many of my friends who are Christie fans cut their teeth on her as middle or high schoolers.  I came to Christie late, so the meatier mystery appeals more to me unless I need that strictly lighter entertainment option. 

In addition, Christie and the other Golden Age writers got their start between the two world wars.  I think this really supported their popularity as it was a time when readers badly needed stories where everything was tied up neatly at the end.  Even today, one school of thought says we read mysteries because we like to have that sense of closure.  More modern detective or crime novels sometimes leave us with more modern senses of ambiguity or disquiet, but I still think the solving of the crime still meets that need today.

Laura: What are your thoughts on Agatha Christie? How would you describe her influence in the mystery genre?

Jean: Although Christie is part of that rational puzzle approach to the mystery, she has had incredible success for a variety of reasons.  One is the sheer number of works she produced – over 80 detective (or thriller) novels, and over 90 novels total over a 50-year career.  The second is the fact that she escapes a bit of the label of formula fiction because of the variety of her detectives, the ingeniousness of her puzzles and the variety in settings.  The relative simplicity of her style also made it easier to translate her works into other languages. At one point, she was second to the Bible in the number of languages in which her books have appeared.

Laura: Is there a writer writing now (or recently) that you’d compare to Christie?

Jean: Someone more expert than I might have a candidate for this comparison.  I don’t think there is anyone who compares because the nature of the detective story has changed so much, and because I doubt anyone will come close to her huge output. 

I do see influences, however.  One is what we now call the “cozy mystery” – a set of writers who minimize the goriness of the crime and focus more heavily on solving the mystery but also provide more character development.  Someone once said that in Agatha Christie, the representation of the crime itself is nothing more than a bloodstain left on the floor, so the cozies are in this tradition. 

The other influence is the tradition brought to perfection in Miss Marple, a detective whom no one suspects of being involved and therefore one who can pick up clues where others couldn’t.  This sort of detective, always an amateur, is also usually a feature of the cozy mystery.  One of my favorites that fits this bill is Alan Bradley’s series (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is the first one) with a precocious child detective Flavia de Luce.  No one suspects her as she solves crimes.  

Jean calls herself an enthusiast rather than an expert, but certainly I learned a great deal from this crash course in mystery. I think my reading of Christie and other detective novels, crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers will be a bit richer for it.  Jean is hoping to teach a continuing education course on the topic sometime in the near future, and I bet the mystery enthusiasts of Howard County will thoroughly enjoy it.

Laura Yoo
HoCoPoLitSo Board member and Associate Professor of English at Howard Community College.

Books aren’t for just reading. They’re for taking off the shelf, stacking, rearranging, and creating. (Click on the photo for a clearer and prettier view.)

*****

back when we were grown ups

we stood on such a full sea

to count the waves

blessing the boats

daring greatly 

and we journeyed to the center of the universe 

to find a room of one’s own

under the tuscan sun

or where the sidewalk ends 

*****

under the unbearable lightness of being

things fall apart

for everything that rises must converge

but the spirit catches you and you fall down

into quicksand

passing

into paradise 

with your crooked little heart

*****

the things they carried

under the warmth of other suns:

home

despair

earthly possessions

hard laughter

immortality

slowness

laughable loves

and

the secret history

of fates and furies –

and so now you know when the men are gone 

*****

Now, your turn.

Laura Yoo HoCoPoLitSo Board member and Associate Professor of English at Howard Community College.

Yes, I know. Poets write. But surely they don’t write all day, every day. They do other stuff.

As a HoCoPoLitSo board member and Howard Community College’s faculty, sometimes I get to see (somewhat) up close what writers do when they’re working away from their desks. On April 28th, HCC and HoCoPoLitSo celebrated Blackbird Poetry Festival with poets Marie Howe and Sandra Beasley, and I got to see Ms. Howe and Sandra at work.

Sandra Beasley visited my composition class on April 28th

The poets came to HCC campus for morning workshops with students. While Ms. Howe visited a literature class, Sandra came to my 11 am composition class to talk about voice and revision. The talk was spot on. She was enthusiastic and attentive to the students. She worked hard during those 80 minutes.

After the morning workshops, the poets attended an informal lunch with some friends of poetry. In the mid-afternoon, from 2:30 to 4:30, they were the feature poets at the Blackbird Poetry Festival’s day reading where they shared the stage with Maryland Poetry Out Loud winners and other student- and faculty-poets. Both Ms. Howe and Sandra went on stage two different times and read several works each. They engaged with the student poets, coached them, and talked to them about the work of poetry and the performance of poetry. When the afternoon reading ended, the poets went to tape The Writing Life interview, where Sandra interviewed Ms. Howe.

At 7:30 pm, our evening event, Nightbird, began. Ms. Howe gave another beautiful reading and Sandra was in the front row listening with the rest of us. And after the reading, Ms. Howe signed books. At this point, it was almost 9 pm. Nonetheless, when I went up to Ms. Howe with a book, she engaged me in a conversation about my own work at HCC. She did the same with the others who approached with books clutched to their chests. She was kind, thoughtful, and engaged with her fans. So gracious. Sandra, too, stayed to chat with the audience in the lobby, and I couldn’t help but smile when I saw her get in line to get Ms. Howe’s book signed.

Poets work hard. I know that much.

I suppose some work harder than others. And I imagine there are writing divas (and divos?) out there who demand only green M&Ms in their “dressing rooms,” but most of the writers that I have met through events like the Blackbird Poetry Festival work hard from morning til late into the evening to read, talk, meet, greet, and shake hands. They take photos, they answer questions, they sign books with personal messages, they ask questions of their fans, they tell stories, and they joke.  Most importantly, they connect. They connect themselves to the readers, the poetry to the poet, and poetry to life. Real life.

They say writing is a lonely task, much of it done in solitude.  The labor of writing takes discipline, craft, and hard work.  But then there is the work that many poets do away from their desks and sometimes very far from home. Sandra Beasley, for example, was off to Massachusetts the day after her performance at Blackbird. Sometimes HoCoPoLitSo’s Irish Evening writers fly in from Ireland just for a few days for a reading or two. So, it seems to me, that so much of the writer’s work is also the people-work.

At readings, I see them scribbling, flipping through their works, and making changes to their reading list.  I see them taking notes, listening to the others, and observing what is going on in the room and who showed up. The best poet-performers listen and watch.  They don’t stand up and read the words on the page in a vacuum. Never.  These poets – the good ones, anyway – make the reading unique to that moment for that group of people. And what they create during that reading cannot be recreated.

They interview each other like they do for HoCoPoLitSo’s The Writing Life series: E. Ethelbert Miller interviewing Amiri Baraka, Roland Flint interviewing Lucille Clifton, or Naomi Ayala interviewing Martin Espada. And they also collaborate with other artists like when Steven Levya performed his poetry with Josh Soto on drums, when Rita Dove shared the stage with violinist Joshua Coyne, and when Patricia Smith performed her poetry with a string quartet.

So, I think that the work of the poet is not so isolated or so esoteric. As Susan Hobby wrote about Ms. Smith’s performance, “An artist works alone in a garret, her solitary room the site of revelation. Or not.”

And if you care to read/see more: Just for fun – here’s a catalog of some of what I have witnessed writers doing (with photos):

• In college, I went to a Maya Angelou reading and she came onto the stage singing. So, sometimes they sing.
• When I met Grace Paley she sat in a circle with 15 college students to read and talk about her stories. And changed lives.
• Derek Walcott had dinner with English graduate students and entertained their very silly questions.
• Lucille Clifton attended HoCoPoLitSPo board meetings on Saturdays.
• Julie Otsuka had lunch with students and told stories about her craft. And later, after her reading, she spoke with community members about her book, When the Emperor was Divine.
  

  Julie Otsuka’s HCC visit 2009

• I’ve seen David Mura stand on stage and inspire HCC faculty and staff with his talk on the Hero’s Journey.
• I saw E. Ethelbert Miller stand at a podium in the lobby of Columbia Art Center and command a crowd on a cold, snowy February night.
• Emma Donoghue wrote the screenplay for novel-turned-movie Room and got nominated for an Oscar. But, more importantly, she came to Columbia for an Irish Evening reading in 2015.
• I’ve seen Martin Espada, a former tenant lawyer, make small talk about the weather in the car ride between the hotel and HCC, then getting on stage to deliver “Imagine the Angels of Bread” and send goosebumps on the arms of the many in the audience, including me.
• Joseph Ross is a high school teacher, and I’ve read his wonderful blogs capturing his experience of teaching as a Poet-in-Residence for HoCoPoLitSo. Here’s one about River Hill High School.
• Ann Bracken facilitated poetry workshops for prisoners at a correctional facility in Jessup, Maryland.
  

  Special Delivery! Home No Home by Naoko Fujimoto (and tea!)

• Laura Shovan, Sandra Beasley, and Derrick Weston Brown also worked as Poet-in-Residence for HoCoPoLitSo and worked with Howard County high school students.
• Taylor Mali speaks about and for the teachers and advocates for the profession of teaching – and he poses for silly photos with students (see below). I’ve seen him speak to community college English professors. I’ve also seen him coach a Poetry Out Loud competitor on how to improve his performance.
  

  Who says poets can’t be silly? In 2015, Taylor Mali poses with Nsikan Akpan

• When Eamon Grennan came to read for Irish Evening this year, he fought a terrible cold and probably exhaustion from traveling to not disappoint his fans. And indeed we were not disappointed.
• Steven Leyva is the editor of The Little Patuxent Review and teaches at the University of Baltimore. He also did professional development workshops for Howard County Schools teachers and gave us a little taste of New Orleans in the coolest poetry reading with a drummer.
• Naoko Fujimoto, a poet I mentioned in my last blog, included a personal note with my book order (and special tea).
• 

  Student Katy Day taking a selfie with Billy Collins at Blackbird Poetry Festival 2014.

  Billy Collins does really cool stuff like creating animation for his poetry and reading at Blackbird Poetry Festival – and he poses for silly photos with students.

  

  Poet Derrick Weston Brown speaks with students at Atholton High School. (Photo by Paige Feilhauer)