Introduction

 

I started teaching at Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1994. This is my final year there and I’m thrilled to showcase some of our students’ and alumni’s work in Poetry. The ten poems featured here were selected from the seventy-six found in our anthology, Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School. They’re a taste of the amazing talent of the over a thousand students with whom I’ve been privileged to work since our Spoken Word Club’s inception in 1999. They include coeditor Dan “Sully” Sullivan, who was my student in 1998 and one of the reasons I created the club.

I’m so proud of what my students and alumni have written, what they’ve accomplished, and the human beings that they are. It’s an honor to get to celebrate with them. Our school has been so supportive of the program and we’ve been fortunate to bring in a remarkable array of authors to help us develop as writers (and educators). It all starts with Malika’s Poetry Kitchen (London) cofounders Malika Booker and Roger Robinson, who not only have worked with our students in Chicago and London, but who laid the foundation of our writing craft and community. Along with Nick Makoha and Jacob Sam-La Rose, they came to OPRFHS on different occasions over the years to help guide us. Then, there were inspiring and foundational workshops led by the likes of Patricia Smith, Tyehimba Jess, Adrian Matejka, avery r. young, Ugochi Nwaogwugwu, Tim Seibles, Terrance Hayes, Kwame Dawes, Kyle Dargan, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Raymond Antrobus, Rachel Long, Caleb Femi, Aisling Fahey, coeditors Franny Choi and Hanif Abdurraqib, and, for a dozen visits, A. Van Jordan. My Spoken Word teaching assistants over the years—Christina Santana, Langston Kerman, Milton McKinney, David Gilmer, Adam Levin, and Christian Robinson—shared their wisdom with students and me, as well. Many alumni, most represented in the anthology, assisted at Spoken Word Club meetings over the years, too.

Our club typically meets Tuesdays and Thursdays after school for two hours per meeting culminating in three showcases per school year for sold- out crowds of over 350 people. Over the years, we’ve averaged about sixty students per showcase. In the lead up, we teach writing craft, create writing prompts, do team-building activities, pick groups with captains, edit/revise, work on performance techniques, and have fun. With Patricia Smith as a model, we’ve always focused on “page before stage.” In addition to promoting student voice and self-expression, we develop leadership skills. Several alumni have gone on to create and/or lead spoken word programming at their respective universities.

Our program has been featured in the award-winning documentary Louder Than a Bomb, and the Steve James docuseries America to Me. Eight of our alumni have gone on to earn MFAs in creative writing and several have become educators. One was National Youth Poet Laureate. Two were National Student Poets. Several have been gold medalists, gold key recipients, and national award winners in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. One won an NBA championship and credits our Spoken Word Club for making him a better teammate. Several have been previously published here and in the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-a-Day. We’ve had winners and runners-up for the high school competitions sponsored by Princeton University and the Poetry Society of America.

These poems give a sense of the talent that has come through our program and we hope they will invoke many new poems. As the wonderful Naomi Shihab Nye wrote of the anthology: “If anyone needs to be convinced that poetry matters—makes us bigger and wider and calmer and more confident—look here.”

On behalf of my coeditors and me, we hope you’ll find inspiration in these poems and that you’ll engage with the remaining ones in the anthology itself when it comes out on February 1, 2022, through Penguin Workshop.