I dream about crab grass. What a pathetic confession! Crab grass slinks into my gardens, sending its scouts ahead of each invasion like spac...

Everyday I read the Huffington Post the way my Dad used to read the Free Press in Detroit. Today I read that some high school scholars took ...

Our family flows toward the Atlantic each summer with our rafts, sunscreen and spawn. We go there to study our familial three R's, to r...

Everything in NYC is bigger, faster, brighter. After a day's work in Brooklyn, Louisa, Kelly and I supped at a little Italian (yummy) pl...

Just back from a Janet Allen Institute in Florida. The skies were blanketed heavily with what looked to be rain clouds but turned out to be...

Once a year reading teachers from all over gather at the International Reading Association meeting -- this year in an attempt to fulfill its...

Arise then...women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: "We will no...

It's that time of year when every kid, teacher, custodian and fraying folder starts crying RECESS. Summer break is breathing hot and hea...

Yesterday at an elementary school came this question from a fifth grader, "have you ever written a poem about the idiot president?...

The eighth graders were restless this afternoon. Every poem inspired a volley of verbal fire with the cannons to the right of them, cannons...

Yesterday, I read an article in the Washington Post that said that the Justice Department is conducting a probe of a $6 billion reading init...

This was such a sad week -- I was in a hotel all last week where the story of the killings at Virginia Tech dominated my room in a constant ...

I remember when my daughter Kelly was getting married, her husband to be, Brian, wasn't all that thrilled about going with her to pick o...

First of all -- I LOVE when teachers have kids think of questions for the author in advance. Of course we NEVER stick to the questions on th...

Ever go looking for one image and find another? I've had that happen countless times with poetry -- I start out writing about one subje...

Writing is a team sport. I know we don't mostly think of it that way, but what is a piece of writing without an audience? This realizati...

He says he was a geek in school -- not athletic or a band member. He thought he would become a poet to make himself stand out, carrying heav...

Okay. I'm still obsessing. (see previous post) It's 4AM. My brain is balled up in a fist and I can't get it to relax. This weeke...

Thirty misspent minutes. Running out the clock until 11PM, Michael and I watched a fraction of a blood dripping, roller coaster crashing, s...

In Oxford, MI. In the middle of a major blizzard. Cold hands. I stop by the local K Mart to buy gloves. I am more than familiar with K Mart...