Poetry highlights in honor of National Poetry Month!
Poet of the Day: Ariana Brown
Ariana Brown is a Black Mexican American poet from San Antonio, Texas, with a BA in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies from UT at Austin. She is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes and a 2014 collegiate National Poetry Slam champion. An alum of Brave New Voices, Brown's work has been featured in PBS, Huffington Post, Blavity, For Harriet, and Remezcla .

Brown, who has been dubbed a "part-time curandera," has performed across the United States at venues such as the San Antonio Guadalupe Theater, Harvard University, Tucson Poetry Festival, and the San Francisco Opera Theater. When she is not onstage, she is probably eating an avocado, listening to Ozuna, or validating Black girl rage in all its miraculous forms. Her work is published in Nepantla , Muzzle, African Voices, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets from Arte Público Press. She is currently earning an MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @arianathepoet .
This poet belongs in our classrooms because…
Ariana Brown’s voice and words are valuable and relatable. She certainly brings a diverse perspective into classrooms too long operating from a worldview that is mainly white, male, and heterosexual, but more importantly she allows our students to access their empathy by sharing her very real experiences. In her, they can see themselves. In teaching her, we disrupt a canon—#disrupttexts— that often does not see them. As we move to change the curricular landscape by rewriting the canon in our own image—to reflect the vastness of our diversity—we must remember to include poetry that exists beyond the page.
A Poem by Ariana Brown
An Excerpt from "Volver, Volver"

y volver, volver
to the mouth of the Yucatán
where we first glistened
with a stranger’s tongue,
Spanish,
our old muscles bullied into
lovely wrecks &
our mothers wept
at the loss, for
they knew language
is the last sound
of war; & then
came the trumpets
Other Poems or Books by Ariana Brown
Read " Invocation” and “Sunday Morning " on an April 4, 2016, post in Heart Journal
Read " IN DEFENSE OF SANTANA’S 'MARIA MARIA' FT. WYCLEF & THE PRODUCT G&B " in the Winter 2017 issue of Raffle
Read " Supremacy " in the June 2017 issue of Muzzle
Read " Don’t Know Nobody from Ellis Island " in the June 2016 issue of Bird’s Thumb
Watch Brown’s spoken word performances of " Volver, Volver "  and " Curanderismo " from Button Poetry
Listen to Let Us Be Enough , Brown’s debut poetry EP
Classroom Connections
In this lesson seed , students compose and perform two contrasting poems on the topics of discrimination and acceptance using Brown’s poems as mentor texts. For a simpler approach, ask students to compare the two poems—the literary devices, as well as the performance.
Alison Daniels is an English teacher and instructional team leader at Thomas Viaduct Middle School in Hanover, Maryland. Against her own advice, she has recently decided to pursue National Board Certification. She has written for ALAN Picks and the Nerdy Book Club. She writes for herself at https://www.thehousethatblumebuilt.com/ and you can follow her on Twitter at @ms_adaniels .