This post is written by Peter Kahn, teacher and editor of Respect the Mic, a expansive, moving poetry anthology, representing 20 years of poetry from students and alumni of Chicago’s Oak Park River Forest High School Spoken Word Club.
When I began my career as a high school English teacher in 1994 I soon realized that many of my students needed more motivation than intrinsic satisfaction and/or a grade to put their all into writing assignments. Over the next several years, I tried to think of real world connections to engage students, while hopefully improving the world in some way. We would occasionally get something published in the local newspaper—great clippings for the refrigerator. We would get administrators and parents to come into class to hear our opinions on topics and themes covered in the literature we were reading and connecting them to what was happening in our school and wider community. We wrote to Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, with no response, but heard back from Edwidge Danticatt (I still have the letters she wrote me) and Dawn Turner Trice (who visited with us two years in a row to discuss her novel, Only Twice I’ve Wished for Heaven). While reading There Are No Children Here, we managed to get one of the main character—Pharoah—to come in to speak with us via letters asking questions about his post-TANCH life and were able to persuade the Chicago Tribune architecture critic to come in to speak to the entire sophomore class about the history of the Henry Horner homes and, more generally, public housing in Chicago. For years, students would visit and bring up those experiences.
I traveled back to those early days of my career when thinking about how to make the Respect the Mic anthology competitions relevant. The anthology itself was conceived in large part to help poetry-averse teachers to get students excited about reading and writing poetry. We’ve tried to demystify the process and show a range of poems written by “everyday” people, many of whom were their age when they wrote their poem in the anthology.
For the competition (which is free to enter), we conceived of three elements to get students and teachers excited to participate:
Final Judges. For the student competition, we invited our co-editor Hanif Abdurraqib who is not only a revered poet, but who is a music critic published in The New York Times and appearing on CNN, and someone who writes about basketball for ESPN. For the teacher competition, we invited one of the most beloved English educators in the country, Carol Jago.
The opportunity to have one’s work utilized by other students and teachers. The winners and runners-up will have their work included on our Respect the Mic website so that it can be shared in classrooms around the country.
Prize money. For the student competition, we figured that $1000 was a nice amount and since the teachers have to put in a bit of work to submit on their students’ behalf, we added $500 for the teacher of the winning student.
We hope to get hundreds, if not thousands, of submissions by our October 20th deadline. It’s a pretty quick process to enter and further details may be found here: https://spokenword.oprfhs.org/rtm-competition
Thank you for sharing poetry with your students!