Poetry highlights in honor of National Poetry Month!
Poet of the Day: Eve L. Ewing
Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a sociologist of education and a writer from Chicago who is currently an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. She has published two poetry collections: 1919 (2019) and Electric Arches (2017); the nonfiction book Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side (2018); and wrote the Ironheart series and currently writes the Champions series both for Marvel Comics. 
(some biographical information found a t eveewing.com )
This poet belongs in our classrooms because…
her poetry reflects the experiences of Black students and teens that they may relate to and that others may learn from. Ewing's poetry references culture and history that may be familiar or that may need to be researched. Her poetic narrative of the 1919 Chicago Race Riot blends primary source documentation with various poetic structures, such as abecedarian, erasure, Golden Shovel, haiburn, and a reconfiguration of various jump- rope rhymes. The publication of 1919 coincided with the 100th anniversary of the Red Summer, as well as the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans being sold to colonists.
A Poem by Eve L. Ewing
Excerpt from “to the notebook kid” published in Electric Arches

got that good B in science kid
you earned it kid
etch your name in a tree
hug your granny on her birthday
think of Alaska when they shootin
curled-up dreams of salmon
safety
tundra
the farthest away place you ever saw in a book
polar bears your new chess partners
pickax in the ice
Northern Lights kid

keep your notebook where your cousins won’t find it.
leave it on my desk if you want
shuffle under carbon paper
and a stamp that screams late
yellow and red to draw the eye from the ocean
you keep hidden in a jacked-up five star.
your mama thought there was a secret in there
thought they would laugh
but that ain’t it .

Selected Works by Eve L. Ewing
Poetry Collections:
1919
Electric Arches

Other publicly available poems:
“I come from the fire city” https://poets.org/poem/i-come-fire-city
“The Discount Mega Mall (in memoriam)” https://poets.org/poem/discount-mega-mall-memoriam
“I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” https://poets.org/poem/i-saw-emmett-till-week-grocery-store

Play:
No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks co-authored with Nate Marshall

Nonfiction:
Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism & School Closings on Chicago’s South Side
Classroom Connections
Teaching ideas for 1919
Since the references in 1919 are particular to Chicago (locations and poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg) and the violence during the Red Summer, the collection is an impetus for researching not only the history but also the violence that has occurred closer to readers’/students’ locations. A free PDF teaching guide for 1919 written by Rabiya Kassam-Clay is available at the Haymarket Books website: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1272-1919

Another good source for information about the Red Summer comes from the Zinn Education Project: https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/remembering-red-summer

The use of primary source documents to inspire poetry, as well as the abecedarian “Coming from the Stock Yards” (pp. 15–16), the haiburn “Haiburn for July 30” (p. 50), and the erasure “it wouldn’t take much” (pp. 56–58) serve as mentor texts for students to create their own poems in these various poetic structures.

Teaching ideas for the three poems from Electric Arches
“The Discount Mega Mall (in memoriam)”
“I come from the fire city”
“to the notebook kid”

I have used all three poems for illustration activities and as mentor texts for “after” poems. The illustration activity is open-ended: after reading the poem, create one or a series of illustration(s) to accompany the poem. I allow students to work in groups. They have drawn, printed, or cut out of magazines illustrations to use. They have created almost a list of illustrations to follow along with the lines, a single scene, an abstract collage, and for “to the notebook kid,” an actual notebook. After creating the illustration, students write a brief explanation of the images and why they chose that format.

For the “after” poems, students chose one of the poems as a model that they use to write their own original work “after Eve L. Ewing.” Students write an “in memoriam” to something or someone gone using the same one-to-three-words-per-line structure. They write an “I come from” poem using the same block prose structure with slashes in place of end punctuation and while focusing on the use of imagery and figurative language. Students write a “to the _____ kid” poem describing themselves and their goals with an emphasis on revealing some hidden talent or interest using the same listing detail structure.
Kristin Runyon , English teacher at Charleston (IL) High School, began as a special education teacher, earned an MA in English from the University of Illinois at Springfield and earned her NBCT in Adolescence and Young Adulthood ELA. She was a frequent participant with the Eastern Illinois Teaching with Primary Sources and a coach and codirector for Eastern Illinois Writing Project. She has been fortunate to meet many Twitterverse teacher friends in real life and at NCTE Conventions over the years and has contributed to #TeachLivingPoets. Runyon will be moving into the role of media center specialist starting in the 2020–21 school year.