Poetry highlights in honor of National Poetry Month!
Poet of the Day: Alberto Ríos
Alberto Ríos was born in Nogales, Arizona, in 1952, when the border between Mexico and the United States was just a line. Rios went on to earn his MFA from the University of Arizona, and he is now a Regents professor and the director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Alberto Rios is also the inaugural poet laureate of Arizona and has published twelve collections of poetry, three short story collections, and a memoir. Through his writing, Rios shares the beauty and complexity of the border, while honoring the culture and language of its inhabitants.
This poet belongs in our classrooms because . . .
This poet belongs in our classrooms, because Alberto Ríos is a voice from the borderlands–a liminal space for which countless opinions exist. In an interview with NPR , Rios describes the border as a place in which, "everybody has an answer for what we ought to do . . . even if they've never visited it."
A Poem by Alberto Ríos
We Are of a Tribe

We plant seeds in the ground
And dreams in the sky,
 
Hoping that, someday, the roots of one
Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other.
 
It has not happened yet.
We share the sky, all of us, the whole world:
 
Together, we are a tribe of eyes that look upward,
Even as we stand on uncertain ground.
 
The earth beneath us moves, quiet and wild,
Its boundaries shifting, its muscles wavering.
 
The dream of sky is indifferent to all this,
Impervious to borders, fences, reservations.
 
The sky is our common home, the place we all live.
There we are in the world together.
 
The dream of sky requires no passport.
Blue will not be fenced. Blue will not be a crime.
 
Look up. Stay awhile. Let your breathing slow.
Know that you always have a home here.



Poems and Books by Alberto Rios



Capirotada (nonfiction book)
Teaching Connections
Collaborative Writing Activity

In this activity, students will take one of the nine couplets in the poem "We Are of a Tribe" and expand the poem with their own writing. Each student will take a couplet and add new lines building on the idea from the original two lines. Then, invite students to share their new poems with their peers. After students share, invite students, collaboratively, to piece their poems back together following the organization of the original poem, couplets 1 through 9. Next ask them to share their new collective poem. From the original poem, students may expand the 18-line poem to 36 lines, or 72 lines, or however many lines they need, and together produce a beautiful new community poem.

Multimodal Assignment

Using the poem "We Are of a Tribe," invite students to compose a multimodal text based on the poem. Ask students to create an image for each couplet, totaling nine images.

These images can include photographs taken on their smartphones, images created with digital tools like Photoshop, or other artistic representations such as drawings or paintings. Encourage students to be creative in their sharing of their images.

For example, a student could share their images in a short video clip in which they read the poem aloud. Students might put their images together on a poster for display. Or students could place the words from the couplets in their images and remix their images with other students to create new texts and new meanings together.

Anthony Celaya is a PhD candidate in English education at Arizona State University, and taught high school English in Mesa, Arizona. Nogales, Arizona was my first home and the home of Alberto Ríos . His memoir, Capirotada , gave me a glimpse into the Nogales my father grew up in, and his poems never fail to transport me back home to the desert.