Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High Hardcover – February 1, 2022 by Peter Kahn School

Description

Author: Kahn Peter

Color: Red

Package Dimensions: 11x197x272

Number Of Pages: 176

Release Date: 01-02-2022

Details: Product Description
An expansive, moving poetry anthology, representing 20 years of poetry from students and alumni of Chicago’s Oak Park River Forest High School Spoken Word Club.

“Poets I know sometimes joke that the poetry club at Oak Park River Forest High School is the best MFA program in the Chicagoland area. Like all great jokes, this one is dead serious.” -Eve L. Ewing, award-winning poet, playwright, scholar, and sociologist

For Chicago’s Oak Park and River Forest High School’s Spoken Word Club, there is one phrase that reigns supreme: Respect the Mic. It’s been the club’s call to arms since its inception in 1999. As its founder Peter Kahn says, “It’s a call of pride and history and tradition and hope.”

This vivid new collection of poetry and prose — curated by award-winning and bestselling poets Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, Peter Kahn, and Dan “Sully” Sullivan — illuminates just that, uplifting the incredible legacy this community has cultivated. Among the dozens of current students and alumni,
Respect the Mic features work by NBA champion Iman Shumpert, National Youth Poet Laureate Kara Jackson, National Youth Poet Laureate Kara Jackson, National Student Poet Natalie Richardson, comedian Langston Kerman, and more.

In its pages, you hear the sprawling echoes of students, siblings, lovers, new parents, athletes, entertainers, scientists, and more –all sharing a deep appreciation for the power of storytelling. A celebration of the past, a balm for the present, and a blueprint for the future,
Respect the Mic offers a tender, intimate portrait of American life, and conveys how in a world increasingly defined by separation, poetry has the capacity to bind us together.
About the Author
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in
PEN American, Muzzle, Vinyl, and other journals, and his essays and criticism have been published in
The New Yorker,
Pitchfork,
The New York Times, and
Fader. His first full-length poetry collection,
The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays,
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was named a book of the year by NPR,
Esquire,
BuzzFeed,
O: The Oprah Magazine,
Pitchfork, and
Chicago Tribune, among others.
Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest was a
New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize finalist and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems,
A Fortune for Your Disaster, won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Franny Choi is the author of two poetry collections,
Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) and
Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). She is a Kundiman Fellow, a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Program. A recipient of numerous awards including the Holmes National Poetry Prize and the Elgin Award for speculative poetry, she co-hosts the poetry podcast
VS alongside fellow poet Danez Smith. Franny has taught creative writing for over ten years in various contexts, including Williams College, the University of Michigan, Project VOICE, and Inside Out Literary Arts.
She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

A former Chicago social worker,
Peter Kahn has been an English teacher since 1994 and a Spoken Word Educator since 2003 at Oak Park/River Forest High School. His students can be seen in
Louder Than a Bomb and
America to Me. A founding member of the London poetry collective Malika’s Kitchen, he co-founded the London Teenage Poetry Slam and, as a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths-University of London, created the Spoken Word Education Training Programme. Peter was a featured speaker at the National Council of Teachers of English’s annual convention