May Tomorrow Be Awake
On Poetry, Autism, and Our Neurodiverse Future
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An author and educator’s pioneering approach to helping autistic students find their voices through poetry—a powerful and uplifting story that shows us how to better communicate with people on the spectrum and explores how we use language to express our seemingly limitless interior lives.
Adults often find it difficult to communicate with autistic students and try to “fix” them. But what if we found a way to help these kids use their natural gifts to convey their thoughts and feelings? What if the traditional structure of language prevents them from communicating the full depth of their experiences? What if the most effective and most immediate way for people on the spectrum to express themselves is through verse, which mirrors their sensory-rich experiences and patterned thoughts?
May Tomorrow Be Awake explores these questions and opens our eyes to a world of possibility. It is the inspiring story of one educator’s journey to understand and communicate with his students—and the profound lessons he learned. Chris Martin, an award-winning poet and celebrated educator, works with non-verbal children and adults on the spectrum, teaching them to write poetry. The results have been nothing short of staggering for both these students and their teacher. Through his student’s breathtaking poems, Martin discovered what it means to be fully human.
Martin introduces the techniques he uses in the classroom and celebrates an inspiring group of young autistic thinkers—Mark, Christophe, Zach, and Wallace—and their electric verse, which is as artistically dazzling as it is stereotype-shattering. In telling each of their stories, Martin illuminates the diverse range of autism and illustrates how each so-called “deficit” can be transformed into an asset when writing poems. Meeting these remarkable students offers new insight into disability advocacy and reaffirms the depth of our shared humanity.
Martin is a teacher and a lifelong learner, May Tomorrow Be Awake is written from a desire to teach and to learn—about the mind, about language, about human potential—and the lessons we have to share with one other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and educator Martin (Things to Do in Hell) braids contemporary neurological research and literary theory in this eloquent reflection on his experience teaching poetry to neurodiverse students. Through his students' poems and endearing anecdotes, Martin, himself a neurodiverse person, seeks to help readers dismantle their conceptions of being "normal"—"to let fall away like the oppressive husk it really is"—and to open their minds to other ways of being and interacting with the world. He gives readers glimpses into his nearly 20 years of sessions with a dozen students, most of them nonspeaking teenagers with autism, to explain how a neurodiverse student's initial reluctance to engage with poetry can lead to gracefully patterned writing. As he analyzes his students' work—highlighting often technically impressive and emotionally poignant poems—he lucidly examines the ways in which they confront societal perceptions of and challenges related to neurodiversity (for one student, "the most difficult aspect of writing is falling into the concentrated physical stillness necessary to type"), as well as broader issues like gender, race, and, most recently, surviving the changes wrought by the pandemic. Martin's narration is empathetic and charming, and his students' writings combine to offer moving, intelligent, and insightful pathways for understanding different minds. The result brilliantly proves that nonverbal doesn't always mean voiceless.
