This post by NCTE Members Scott Bayer and Joel Garza is reprinted with permission from #THEBOOKCHAT.
With #THEBOOKCHAT, Scott Bayer and Joel Garza created and continue to nurture a space for deliberate and brave readers. For years, they even curated classroom-ready resources for teachers eager to read and teach books from our wide world of literature.
Sometimes, however, a whole text is difficult to fit into a curriculum due to time or budget constraints. Enter LatiNext, volume 4 in Haymarket Books’ Breakbeat Poets series. If you haven’t read it, it’s an illuminating anthology celebrating an array of nationalities, genders, sexualities, races and writing styles. With LatiNext, #THEBOOKCHAT saw an opportunity to center the voices of Latinx poets and the expertise of Latinx instructors.
Click on the image for 11 classroom-ready lessons designed for eleven different poems in LatiNext!
The poets featured in these lessons are Denise Frohman, Carlos Andrés Gómez, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Anacaona Rocio Milagro, Gabriel Ramirez, Julian Randall, stephanie roberts, MJ Santiago and Javier Zamora, as well as the anthology’s co-editor, José Olivarez.
The lessons were written by Steven Arenas, #THEBOOKCHAT’s Joel Garza, #DisruptTexts’ Lorena Germán, Isabel Morales, Lizz Melendez, NCTE English Journal Editor R. Joseph Rodríguez, Tiana Silvas, Christina Torres and #DisruptTexts’ Julia Torres.
Please enjoy, share, and join #THEBOOKCHAT in reading and teaching deliberately all year long!
It is the policy of NCTE in all publications, including the Literacy & NCTE blog, to provide a forum for the open discussion of ideas concerning the content and the teaching of English and the language arts. Publicity accorded to any particular point of view does not imply endorsement by the Executive Committee, the Board of Directors, the staff, or the membership at large, except in announcements of policy, where such endorsement is clearly specified.
Joel Garza
is the Upper School instructor of English at Greenhill School in Addison, Texas. Outside of school, he serves on NCTE’s Secondary Steering Committee, he cheerleads Dallas’s Deep Vellum Publishing, and he cohosts #THEBOOKCHAT with Scott Bayer. It’s a Twitter chat devoted to providing resources for teachers of emerging &/or under-read writers.
After 15 years in the classroom, teaching students of all readiness levels in grades 9-12, Scott Bayer is now serving as a grade 6-12 English Language Arts Instructional Specialist. He works with teachers and administrators from nearly 70 schools in an effort to positively impact 80,000 students. He helps shape educational experiences for students that challenge and inspire, while fostering independent thinking, and developing self-reliant learners.