Get Lit Rising
Words Ignite. Claim Your Poem. Claim Your Life.
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Get to know the Get Lit Players—a group of teens who use poetry to take on the world—with this standards-based book that sheds light on teen issues through their own poetry and slam poetry performances.
Get Lit Rising brings to life the true story of nineteen teen poets (the Get Lit Players) who are inspiring thousands of teens across the country through their award-winning performances of classic and spoken word poems. This book takes readers inside the private lives of these teen poets as they try to transform the lives of inner city teens in some of the toughest life circumstances. The Get Lit Players include teens who struggle with homelessness, autism, incarceration, body image, depression, and more. But they use the power of poetry to reclaim their lives and influence their friends, families, and communities.
This uplifting book also offers the classic poems that have most inspired the Get Lit Players, along with their own personal response poems, and each chapter offers questions, writing prompts, and how-tos for readers to set their own inner poet free. Ending with a section for parents and educators featuring the curriculum that’s already in schools throughout California, this slam-dunk shows how to get teens excited about poetry and how to create poetry groups and slams in their own communities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Personal essays and poems from 19 teenage poets, members of a poetry troupe connected with the Get Lit Words Ignite literacy organization, are featured in this moving anthology. The young poets discuss their lives in candid essays and identify classic poems (from the likes of Charles Bukowski, Langston Hughes, and Marge Piercy) that they have found inspiring. The poets then follow the poems they have selected with their own "response" poems, which frequently touch on gender identity, mental health, body image, and violence. After each entry, Lane, who founded Get Lit, provides questions for readers to consider and prompts to jump-start their writing ("Write about a fight you're fighting within yourself"). Lane and her young collaborators present an inspiring example of how poetry in the present communicates with that of the past. Ages 12 up.