Introduction

Not long ago I walked into my graduate poetry workshop at Rutgers-Newark, where I have been teaching for the last decade. It was a Monday, and I carried into the classroom the weight of a new burden: the US Department of Health and Human Services had just proposed to establish a legal definition of gender based on the genitalia a person is born with. It was a cruel and unnecessary position, designed to inflict pain on the small but vibrant trans community.

That mattered to me because a number of my own students identified as trans or queer or non-binary. I wasn’t certain how to address this latest assault against my LGBTQIA family without sullying the sanctity of the safe space we had created together. But I didn’t want to ignore the harsh reality of this politicized move because it was consequential to our well-being.

Sadly, I had been placed in this situation before. I comforted my students after the 2016 presidential election, I consoled a distressed young woman who was exhausted from marching in the streets on behalf of women’s rights. I strained to offer words of reassurance to a DACA recipient. I gave a sexual assault survivor a much-needed warm embrace. Every encounter demanded more than what I thought I could provide. As each travesty unfolded on social media it was becoming increasingly difficult to walk into the classroom to talk about poetry, let alone expect these young people to concentrate. With all of this violent language in the air, were they writing?

Indeed they were. On Mondays, a new batch of poems was passed around and we discussed them. The next few hours were expended on a positive engagement with language. For some of the work the subject matter mirrored the emotional turmoil of the times we now lived in. Or the poems dared to dream of better places to inhabit. And if the news cycle was particularly unsettling that week I took heart that one thing was certain: poetry. It became my anchor. In fact, knowing that nothing could stop the creativity of my students became my source of solace.

So when I walked into the classroom soon after that outrageous US HHS announcement, I brought to the table something different: my gratitude.

“I just want to say,” I told the workshop, “how wonderful it feels to come into this room on Monday nights. Your work is the light you bring into our broken world. We’re receiving such terrible messages about who we are and yet here you are, writing your lives, your selves, your rage and your hopes into the poems. Thank you.”

Dear reader, I present to you an even more expansive illustration of the light that writers shine upon the dark. Writing amplifies our questions and illuminates the unexpected places where we might find the answers. And if not the answers then an opportunity to reflect, rethink, or reimagine.