Poetry Inside Out welcomes our 2024-2026 Teaching Fellows
October 19th through the 21st, Poetry Inside Out held its 3rd annual Teaching Fellowship retreat, welcoming ten previous Teaching Fellows and 5 new ones. Traveling from all corners of the country, fellows met in San Francisco to attend workshops and hear presentations from returning fellows.
Sally O’Brien, a 2023-2024 Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellow pictured above, shared with the team how she views her classroom and students as part of a mycelium network. Much like a mushroom is a signal for an entire network of underground life—what we see in the classroom is only a fraction of what occurs in a student’s mind. Translation, poetry, and creativity can work to attract different parts of a student’s mycelial network and encourage them to engage with their classmates and each activity. Thanks, Sally!
Much like a mushroom is a signal for an entire network of underground life—what we see in the classroom is only a fraction of what occurs in a student’s mind.
The Poetry Inside Out team is also a mycelial network, where a lot of progress happens behind the scenes. We’re so excited to see our previous Teaching Fellows sprouting mushrooms at various academic events around the country, and we want to honor the hard work that they continuously do all year long. Our Teaching Fellows attend monthly Zoom meetings, develop poem pages for circulation throughout the Poetry Inside Out network, and constantly work to transform research around classroom accessibility and multilingualism by speaking at conferences and authoring papers.
We’re so grateful to our previous Teaching Fellows for their continued commitment to Poetry Inside Out. As a result of their continued efforts, we’ve formalized an extended Fellowship for this cohort of Fellows. This year’s Fellowship is now a two-year, funded program, and our 2024-2026 Teaching Fellows will work together for an extra year to deepen their connections and research.
We want to give a warm welcome to Andrea Barnes, Danielle Surrette, Anna Chaewon, Chris Lopez-Cepero, and Jewel Sanchez! Stay tuned to our Features page for some Teaching Fellow spotlights as the year continues.
Giovanna Lomanto is a poet and essayist with a tendency to play the same song on repeat until she has memorized every last note. She received her BA in English at U.C. Berkeley and finished her MFA at NYU, during which time she published two poetry collections and two mixed media chapbooks.
