This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary from the series of poems, Danitra Brown Leaves Town. Danitra and Zuri are two city-girls and best friends, and Danitra goes away to her auntĺ䁥_s house for the summer. These poems tell a story about how the girls stayed in touch by writing letters to each other, and how they discovered that they could have fun apart from one another while still remaining friends.

This is an activity that leads students to reflect on how some gender stereotypes can affect their lives which are either held by people of their society or by themselves. For that, they can manifest their opinion about them in a poem. 

Students will learn and utilize list poems, understand and appreciate multiple perspectives while analyzing figures, memories and events in their educational community.  They will also apply what they have learned to create a new product. 

This mini-unit is an introduction to poetry and can be used in middle school or early high school. Each lesson should take about an hour and covers basic such as: Prose vs. Poetry, Traditional vs. Organic Poetry, poetry structure, figurative language and sound devices, context clues, tone, and meaning. Several examples of poems are provided along with notes, guided practice, and indepent assessments. 

California Poet Laureate Al Young has created a profound and enduring body of work that represents our time. Young's numerous publications in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and for the stage and screen explore the American, human condition through the lens of the individual voice. Tune in as he reads a selection of his Poems before a live audience at UC Berkeley. (28 minutes)

Revolutionary poet, playwright, and activist Amiri Baraka is recognized as the founder of the Black Arts Movement, a literary period that began in Harlem in the 1960s and forever changed the look, sound, and feel of American poetry. 26 minutes)

Arthur Sze is an internationally known writer and celebrated translator. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sze teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he resides. (29 minutes)

Barbara Guest has published over ten volumes of poetry. One of the original members of the New York School of Poets, Guest reinvents herself with every book. Her recent titles include Miniatures and Other Poems, Rocks on a Platter, and Selected Poems. Charles Bernstein writes that Guest's works "have become an integral part of the fabric of contemporary American poetry." A graduate of UC Berkeley, Guest has been honored with the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement by the Poetry Society of America. She resides in Berkeley. (28 minutes)

Poet Brenda Hillman writes of the realms where the division between the sensual and spiritual dissolve. In her passionate reading, Hillman uses language to explore the edges of human consciousness. (28 minutes)

Camille Dungy is the author of two poetry collections and teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University. (27 minutes)

Clayton Eshleman, American poet, translator, and editor, reads from his recently released translation "Solar Throat Slashed," by AimŽ CŽsaire, co-translated with A. James Arnold. CŽsaire, a strong anticolonialist, was born in the Caribbean and wrote his Poems and plays in French. (57 minutes)

Charismatic poet Cornelius Eady uses deft paradoxes to meet the world's absurdities head-on. In a powerful reading of his own work, Eady recites like a jazz singer croons, emphasizing his poetry's hard-hitting content. (28 minutes)

Dan Bellm has published three books of poetry, including Practice, winner of a 2009 California Book Award and named one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of 2008 by the Virginia Quarterly Review. His first collection, One Hand on the Wheel, launched the California Poetry Series and his second, Buried Treasure, won the Poetry Society of AmericaŐs Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award. (29 minutes)

David St. John was widely praised and was a National Book Award finalist for Study for the World's Body. Recent books are The Red Leaves of Night from HarperPerennial and Prism from Arctos Press, and his newest, The Face , a book-length Poems. His image-rich work muses on both ecstasy and loss. (51 minutes)

World-renowned poet Diane di Prima, one of the preeminent writers to emerge from the Beat generation, wrote in Manhattan for many years before relocating to San Francisco, where she has been for nearly four decades. Her 43 books of poetry and prose have been translated into over twenty languages. (29 minutes)

Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail immigrated to the United States in 1996 after increasing harassment over her poetry, which confronts war and exile with subversive depictions of suffering. In 2001 she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. (28 minutes)

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Eavan Boland is one of the foremost voices in Irish literature. Her ten volumes of poetry include Against Love Poetry, which was a New York Times notable book, and New Collected Poems. She is also a noted editor and translator. Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Stanford University. (27 minutes)

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia but raised in New York City, Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet, scholar and reckless metaphysician. A book of his poetry, The Off-Centaur, was published by Germ Folios, and his volume The Compleat Unraveller will be published in 2005 by Ugly Duckling Press. He is editor and co-translator of the forthcoming anthology, OBERIU and the Chinars: Russian Absurdism, 1927-1941. Ostashevsky won the 2003 Wytter Bynner Poetry Translation Fellowship for his translations from Russian. He teaches at NYU. (45 minutes)

"Seductive, edgy, gothic and sublime, these Poems haunt the body as much as the soul," wrote Beckian Fritz Goldberg of Frank Paino's second book, Out of Eden. Lynda Hull has said of his first book, The Rapture of Matter, "These fearless Poems go where they must with a visionary fervor, guiding the reader through the darkest passages of experience and reminding us of the best, most redemptive qualities of the human". Frank Paino was born in Cleveland in 1960 and lives in Berea, Ohio. He formerly published under the name Frankie Paino before changing genders. (29 minutes)

Born in San Francisco in 1930, world-renowned poet, essayist, and environmentalist Gary Snyder has published sixteen books of poetry and prose, and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for Turtle Island. Snyder has traveled widely and lived for extended periods of time in Japan, where he studied and practiced Rinzai Zen. He is currently a professor at University of California, Davis. (29 minutes)