Introducing Our 2023-2024 Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows: Lisa Wong
Learn about the minds behind the mission. CAT proudly presents this spotlight on this year’s cohort of Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellows!
This school year, the Center for the Art of Translation honors the recipients of the second annual Poetry Inside Out Teaching Fellowship, a year-long program designed to support teachers as they pursue curricular research, build skills in creative language instruction, and learn how to inspire collaborative discussions of poetry in translation in the classroom.
Teaching Fellows join a vibrant network of students, teachers, poets, translators, and academics committed to open-ended dialogue about language and literature, working together to develop culturally responsive, integrated curricula based on Poetry Inside Out’s key practices. They will deepen their understanding of classroom practices that contextualize learning, uplift student achievement, leverage and affirm students’ cultural identity, and develop critical thinking skills.
Each of our Fellows brings a unique perspective and level of dynamism to our programs, and we want to highlight their individual ideas and approaches. Over the course of this next few weeks, we’ll be publishing brief Q&A’s with the fellows to celebrate them with our CAT community.
Introducing Lisa Wong
Lisa Wong is in her 38th year as an educator. She is super enthused to work this year with Poetry Inside Out because of how it melds and expands her experiences working with immigrant and multilingual students at the elementary, middle, high school, and university levels. Currently, she teaches high school ELD to newcomer students in the East Bay San Francisco Bay Area. What she treasures about PIO is the deep, reflective, and always respectful collaboration and mentorship. She treasures the sharing of learning by everyone involved–from students, colleagues, poets, artists, art & poetry educators, professors, donors, publishers, to the whole multilingual community.
What interests you about Poetry Inside Out’s programming/curricula, and what excites you about this fellowship? What do you hope to get from it?
Foundationally, in my teaching, my guiding concepts are communication, information, translation, presentation (poetic and artistic), and human connection. Poetry Inside Out’s curriculum and fellowship facilitate and deeply embody all this for me. Approaching my final years as an educator, I’m excited to get to “my heart” of teaching and learning, with my students and with PIO.
Do you have any interests in international literature/poetry or foreign languages that you’d like to mention?
I’ve grown up and have always worked in a multilingual, multi-community world environment. Students in my classes from many different parts of the world have enriched my life with their languages, art, stories, and experiences. This school year, through my students, Spanish and Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, and Toishanese) continue to be of interest and development; and I’ve been either introduced or am exploring further Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Arabic, Dari, and Mongolian languages. Through PIO and with more time, I will happily enjoy more international literature and poetry and become more familiar or even perhaps study to be more fluent in another language, other than English.
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.
