Blends history and theory with practical descriptions of how spoken word poetry is taught and how to produce spoken word events. The Room Is on Fire offers an overview of youth spoken word poetry’s history, its practitioners, participants, and practices. Susan Weinstein explores its grounding in earlier literary/performance/educational traditions and discusses its particular challenges. In order to analyze these issues, the story of how youth spoken word poetry developed as a field is told through the voices of those involved. Interviewees include the people who organized the first youth poetry slam festivals, the founders of central youth spoken word organizations, and a selection of young people who have participated in their local programs and in regional and national events over the last two decades. Narratives about individual and communal efforts and experiences are supported by analyses of full-text poems by youth poets and by reference to contemporary scholarship in performance studies, critical youth studies, and new literacy studies. Blending history and theory with practical descriptions of how spoken word poetry is taught and how to produce spoken word events, the book will appeal to researchers, teacher educators, and K–12 teachers.

The Room Is on Fire offers an overview of youth spoken word poetry's history, its practitioners, participants, and practices. Susan Weinstein explores its grounding in earlier literary/performance/educational traditions and discusses its particular challenges. In order to analyze these issues, the story of how youth spoken word poetry developed as a field is told through the voices of those involved. Interviewees include the people who organized the first youth poetry slam festivals, the founders of central youth spoken word organizations, and a selection of young people who have participated in their local programs and in regional and national events over the last two decades. Narratives about individual and communal efforts and experiences are supported by analyses of full-text poems by youth poets and by reference to contemporary scholarship in performance studies, critical youth studies, and new literacy studies. Blending history and theory with practical descriptions of how spoken word poetry is taught and how to produce spoken word events, the book will appeal to researchers, teacher educators, and K–12 teachers.

“Mesmerizing and haunting.”—Lisa Gardner “T. Jefferson Parker is the poet of American crime fiction, and The Room of White Fire absolutely proves why.”—C.J. Box In this stirring thriller from New York Times bestseller and award winner T. Jefferson Parker, P.I. Roland Ford must hunt down a soldier who is damaged by war, dangerous, and on the run. Roland Ford—once a cop, then a marine, now a private investigator—is good at finding people. But when he’s asked to locate an Air Force veteran who’s escaped from a mental institution, he realizes he’s been drawn into something deep and dark. What he doesn’t know is why a shroud of secrecy hangs over the disappearance of Clay Hickman—and why he’s getting a different story from everyone involved. In a flash, what began as just a job becomes a life-or-death obsession for Ford, pitting him against immensely powerful and treacherous people and forcing him to contend with chilling questions about truth, justice, and the American way. “A fast-paced, beautifully written thriller."—The Washington Post