Festival 2010: Special Opportunities for New Jersey Teachers

A Life Together/Poets for Teachers
Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar
Thursday, October 7, 3:00-5:00 p.m.
New Jersey Performing Arts Center

A Life Together/Poets for Teachers is being offered free of charge exclusively to New Jersey teachers who will also be attending the October 7 Poetry Sampler that evening.

Join poets Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar for an intimate reading and conversation with two poets and teachers who have made a life together while making a life in poetry

Earn 5 Professional Development Hours

Attend A Life Together/Poets for Teachers and the Poetry Sampler, and fill out a simple survey, and earn 5 Professional Development Hours.

Call the NJPAC Box Office at 1-888-466-5722, and mention the “Teach Poetry” promotion. You will be offered the option of purchasing either a Thursday night ticket or a Four-Day Pass at the discounted teacher rate. Using the “Teach Poetry” promotion when ordering tickets will automatically generate a ticket for you for A Life Together/Poets for Teachers.

If you have already purchased a Thursday evening ticket or Four-Day Pass, simply call the box office and tell them you want to add the “Teach Poetry” event. The ticketing staff will be able to call up your sales record and generate a ticket for the afternoon event.

You must have a valid New Jersey teacher’s ID to participate.

DORIANNE LAUX’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Earlier collections include Awake; What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; and Smoke, as well as two small press editions, Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms. Her fifth collection of poetry, The Book of Men, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2011. Laux is the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in The Body Electric: America’s Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and The Best of the Net Anthology. Laux has been teaching poetry in private and public venues since 1990 and currently teaches poetry in the M.F.A. program at North Carolina State University.

JOSEPH MILLAR‘s first collection, Overtime (2001), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and his second, Fortune, was published in 2007. A native of Pennsylvania, Millar attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work has won him a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2008 Pushcart Prize and has appeared in magazines such as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review and Ploughshares. In 1997, he gave up his job as a telephone-installation foreman to try his hand at teaching. A new chapbook, Bestiary, is now available from Red Dragonfly Press, and a third collection, Blue Rust, will be published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press in fall 2011. Millar is on the core faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux.

Read on to see how teachers can
Earn up to 20 Professional Development Hours
at the Dodge Poetry Festival

Professional Development Hours

For each day you wish to earn 5 Professional Development Hours, you will need to pick up a PDH form, which can be filled out during the day and dropped off before you leave the Festival.

On Thursday, pick up a blue PDH form in the lobby of NJPAC’s Victoria Theater as you enter for A Life Together/Poets for Teachers. Please be sure to drop off the completed form at the end of the Poetry Sampler reading in the evening. You may give the form to any NJPAC usher as you leave.

On Friday, High School Student Day, pick up a green PDH form at the Information Tent in the courtyard in front of NJPAC. Please be sure to drop off the completed form at the Information Tent as you leave the Festival or by 4:30 p.m. If you are staying for evening events, you may give the form to any NJPAC usher as you leave.

On Saturday, pick up a purple PDH form at the Information Tent in the courtyard in front of NJPAC. Please be sure to drop off the completed form at the Information Tent as you leave the Festival or by 4:30 p.m. If you are staying for evening events, you may give the form to any NJPAC usher as you leave.

On Sunday, pick up a pink PDH form at the Information Tent in the courtyard in front of NJPAC. Please be sure to drop off the completed form at the Information Tent as you leave the Festival.

When you pick up your PDH form each day, you will also receive written instructions for how to go online and submit a Festival questionnaire. The questionnaire must be completed by October 31, 2010, to qualify for Professional Development Hours. The Festival questionnaire will be available beginning October 11.

If we receive your questionnaire by October 31, your Professional Development Hour Certificate will be mailed by December 1. If you submitted a questionnaire and have not received a Professional Development Certificate by December 15, you must contact us via email at festival@grdodge.org or call 973-540-8442, ext.139.

Professional Development Hours for the 2010 Festival
will not be processed after January 1, 2011.

Even if you are not submitting for Professional Development Hours, please complete the questionnaire to help us plan Festival 2012. Teacher responses to past questionnaires have proven invaluable and led to important changes in the Poetry Kit for Teachers and the structure of High School Student Day.

Visit us as www.dodgepoetry.org
or write to us at festival@grdodge.org.