A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
By Aaron Counts, WITS Writer-in-Residence Each spring, schools in many districts around the country shift their focus from whatever learning is usually going on in classrooms to make room for standardized testing season. Here in Seattle, that test is the SBAC (Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium). It is a multi-subject test based on the Common Core State […]
Newer Skeletons (Or, A Turn of Events I Never Would Have Anticipated But Am Not Complaining About) we are starting to see each other like x-rays. starting to carefully examine each other, (exciting) & ive been examining myself too. (powerful) i love this. how else could i learn so much about bodies without seeing every […]
Butterflies Yesterday my name was dazzling diamond. Today my name is bright shiny star, soaring through the sky. Sometimes I am an empty house, a book with no pages. Strangers think my name is amusing charming rose. People don’t know I am silly princess, queen of art, dazzling mermaid, rough and tough. My real name […]
Henri Rousseau On the forest floor, the trees growing with bananas and peaches. A flower in the distance is as pink as a sunset flying away and the light blue and gray sky is like a fan trying to blow its way out of trouble. I’m telling you there is more to this jungle than […]
By Ann Teplick, WITS Writer-in-Residence Sleep in a field of salmon peonies. A rooftop with saxophone jazz. A sand dune with peacocks. All the warm night, sleep by the creek with its burble, the sheep with its fleece of charcoal, the sister who whispers “Let’s launch the canoe.” All the warm night. As a […]
As part of our Required Reading series, we share a list of three essential works for each of SAL’s featured writers. Up this time: groundbreaking poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine. Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) In 1970, Harvard professor Chester Pierce came up the term “micro-aggression” to describe the unconscious dismissals and insults non-black Americans inflict on black people. In […]
Bathing in India Before I was a citizen of this country, I was a citizen of the bucket. Staring at the water right under my nose. I don’t believe I can fit. Lifting me up, my mom tells me it is the only way, my feet dangling centimeters above the bubbly water. An orange bucket […]
In My Own Underwater World Sometimes I feel like a fish in a tank in the jungle – out of place, silent while everyone is roaring, squawking respected in their hidden languages and I just sit there in my own underwater world I feel ignored, these animals drink my world while I breathe it as […]
By Clare Hodgson Meeker, WITS Writer-in-Residence Don’t ask kids what they want to be when they grow up but what problems do they want to solve. ―Jaime Casap, Google Global Education Evangelist On my first day of a nine-week residency with third graders at Whittier Elementary, I gathered the students on a bright throw rug […]
By Matt Gano, WITS Writer-in-Residence when the poems with long lines salted raw on page make you aware of your meat, mark them with an asterisk, for the sky she fills with ink Over the past year, fellow writer Aaron Counts and I have had the privilege of mentoring Seattle’s first Youth Poet Laureate (YPL), […]