Activism

Use the space of a poem to describe your vision of a Future House.

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Thursday, 16 March 2023

Authors Take Action is organizing a community poetry project for kids.
I invite children’s poets and authors (YOU!) to create writing prompts on the theme of CLIMATE.

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Thursday, 8 December 2022

One of my favorite projects of 2022 was writing a series of poems for Nature Culture’s Writing the Land Series. This organization pairs poets with local-to-them land trusts, to highlight our deep and abiding relationship with the soil, the forests, the farms.

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Thursday, 1 December 2022

My heart is broken. My dear friend and collaborator, the poet Michael Rothenberg, passed away on November 21.

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Thursday, 6 January 2022

Happy first Poetry Friday of 2022! Today, I’m featuring my favorite middle grade book of 2021 — the brilliant (and hilarious, and sad) climate emergency satire, ONE SMALL HOP by Madelyn Rosenberg. Here is an abbreviated description of the story from Goodreads: Perfect for fans of Carl Hiaasen’s classic Hoot, this humorous adventure story set in […]

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Thursday, 17 June 2021

Hi, Poetry Friday friends. Today, I am sharing a very special call for poetry submissions. My friend, the poet Hiram Larew, is the positive force behind the website www.Poetry X Hunger.com. Hiram is using poetry to draw attention to the issue of hunger in our country and the world. But before the submission details… here […]

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Thursday, 15 April 2021

Happy National Poetry Month, everyone. According to Poets.Org, it’s the 25th anniversary! For the next few weeks, I will be featuring Asian American authors on my blog as part of the annual #AuthorsTakeAction initiative. In each post, I’ll share a recommended middle grade or YA novel by an Asian American author and a read-alongside poem. […]

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Thursday, 6 February 2020

This week, I’d like to thank Margarita Engle for her activism and advocacy during her term as Young People’s Poets Laureate and beyond. I recently read her sweeping history of Latin Americans in what is now the United States, Dreams from Many Rivers: A Hispanic History of the United States Told in Poems. I shared […]

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Thursday, 19 September 2019

Happy Poetry Friday everyone! Thanks to the fabulous Linda Baie at Teacher Dance for hosting this week’s Poetry Friday link-up. (Look for a cameo from Linda a bit later in this post!) This Friday and next, I am celebrating Read a Poem to a Child Day. I wrote about this annual initiative a few weeks […]

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A week ago today, we woke up to news of another mass shooting — this time at a California bar where it had been college night. It had only been eleven days since eleven people were shot and killed at a Pittsburgh synagogue. In a rush of emotion, I wrote about my experience seeing a […]

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Laura Shovan

Laura Shovan is the author of the award-winning middle grade novel, The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary. Her second book, Takedown, is a Junior Library Guild and PJ Our Way selection. Look for A Place at the Table, co-written with Saadia Faruqi, in 2020. Laura is a poet-in-the-schools Maryland.

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