NCTE Verse - Adam Falkner

Poetry highlights in honor of National Poetry Month!

Poet of the Day: Adam Falkner

Adam Falkner is a poet, educator, and arts and culture strategist. He is the author of The Willies (Button Poetry, 2020) and Adoption (Winner of the 2017 Diode Editions Chapbook Award). A former high school English teacher in New York City’s public schools, Falkner is the founder and executive director of the pioneering diversity consulting initiative the Dialogue Arts Project , in which capacity he develops and facilitates training for schools, companies, and cultural institutions across the country. Falkner has toured the United States as a guest artist, lecturer, and trainer for thousands of educators and corporate employees, and was the featured performer at President Obama’s Grassroots Ball at the 2009 Presidential Inauguration. He holds a PhD in English and Education from Columbia University.

This poet belongs in our classrooms because . . .

Heralded by Cornel West as a poet "whose prophetic voice we need in these dark times," Adam Falkner’s poems celebrate the importance of courageous self-examination as a way of healing and better understanding the world. His work reflects the experiences of LGBTQ+ teens, teens, and families struggling with addiction, young voices wrestling with toxic masculinity, and students’ journeys toward considering racial identity. Falkner’s work helps educators center social and emotional learning, and the practice of using classroom spaces to critically engage intersectional issues of race, gender, queerness, and popular culture.

A Poem by Adam Falkner

Lets Get One Thing Halfway Straight: I have spent my entire life

trying on costumes because no one told me I couldn’t and the

stakes were never that high which I’ve come to think is mostly what

makes a white writer a white writer. The last time anyone referred

to me by that name was exactly never but that’s also the point. I

am a queer poet. Child of an addict. Masquerading white boy. My

best friend died and it was sad and these are the stories I water

into bloom: camp counselor test cheat choirboy cypher rapper /

scratch golfer honor roll weirdo point guard / and Whitman says

very well you contain multitudes but he was a white writer too. The

not-so-funny thing about spending a life proving you aren’t

something is that any story that isn’t the story is survival or more

like a brick for laying until the wall is high enough that you’re safe

inside and you wake up and say whoops whose house is this who

did I hurt to get here and is it too late / to call for help.

Books

The Willies (Button Poetry, 2020)

Adoption (Diode Editions, 2018)

Poems (Read)

Willie Boy

The Year The Wu-Tang Drops

Poems (Watch)

My Father Is a Mansion

The Whitest Thing

Interview

Adam Falkner in Conversation w/ Conde Nast’s them Magazine

Adam Falkner in Conversation w/ The Poetry Vlog

Teaching Ideas

Teaching Ideas for The WIllies

Teaching the Intake Suite

One of the central themes of The Willies is the process of transition and "becoming"— one character comes out of the closet, another comes out of addiction. Throughout the book, many small poems share the same title of "Intake" to provide snapshots of both stories. As a writing exercise, have students select a word or phrase they feel connected to in some way that has multiple meanings, and teach a lesson on the poetic form of the ghazal. Then, have students write a series of 2 or 3 short poems, each titled after their "ghazal word," but offering different meanings or stories behind it.

Nostalgia Ultra

The Willies uses popular culture— especially music and hip hop— as a mirror. A lens. A tool for better examining ourselves. Choosing poems from the " album drop" series in the book, build a unit that challenges students to think about a TV show, or actor, or kind of music, or any artifact form pop culture that they used to love—o r, that they currently love, but in a complicated way. Have students write a series of poems from the third person perspective that chronicle who they were at various stages of loving that thing.

Quick Prompts:

The first line of The Willies is: Finally, the poem I will not write. What’s yours? Write that poem.

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Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz is an award-winning associate professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on racial literacy in teacher education, Black girl literacies, and Black and Latinx male high school students. Sealey-Ruiz appeared in Spike Lee’s "2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright", a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou. A poet who has written poetry for over 30 years, Yolanda’s first full-length collection is Love from the Vortex & Other Poems (Kaleidoscope Vibrations, 2020).