This video of Elizabeth Alexander reading the poem “Praise Song for the Day” that she composed for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration ceremony is the seventh in the “Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community” series. The companion lesson contains a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading and listening to the poem.
This is an audio recording of the poet, Adrienne Su, reading the poem “Peaches.” The companion lesson contains a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading to help them enter and experience the poem.
This audio file is a recording of the poet, Minnie Bruce Pratt, reading the poem “The Great Migration.” The companion lesson contains a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading to help them enter and experience the poem.
This video of the poet, Edward Hirsch, offering a little backstory, then reading the poem “Cotton Candy.” Companion lesson plan “Cotton Candy” by Edward Hirsch
Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest derives much of its comedic and thematic heft from the way in which it inverts the values of everyday life.
This video is the third in the “Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community” series. It provides a video of the United State Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, reading the poem “Every Day We Get More Illegal” and a companion lesson with a sequence of activities for use with secondary students before, during, and after reading to help them enter and experience the poem.
Poet Claudia Rankine reads her poem "from Citizen, VI [on the train the woman standing]” as part of "Incredible Bridges: Poets Creating Community," a project developed by the Academy of American Poets in partnership with EDSITEment.
Harriet Jacobs was a remarkable woman who was born into slavery in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, and died free in Washington, D.C., at the age of eighty-four. In her writing, she put an individual face on major social and political events of her era, particularly one of the most inhumane aspects of enslaved womanhood, sexual abuse and molestation by white men. After escaping from her master, she spent seven long years enduring great discomfort in the space she called “my dismal little hole,” a 9’ x 7’ x 3’ crawlspace above the porch of her grandmother, emerging only occasionally late at night to try to walk.
Elizabeth Keckly was a remarkable woman who was born into slavery in 1818 just south of the major market center of Petersburg, Virginia. She learned her craft—sewing—from her mother, who was an expert seamstress enslaved in the Burwell family. When Reverend Burwell, Keckly’s master and half-brother (they shared a father) relocated to Hillsborough, North Carolina, in 1832, she soon followed. Six years later, Anna Burwell, Keckly’s mistress, started a school for young girls in the family home, with an already over-worked Keckly charged as the sole servant.
