COVID-19 Teacher Poets Writing to Bridge the Distance

About the Collection

The idea of preserving the voices and experiences of teachers who navigated a new reality due to the COVID-19 global pandemic was the starting point of the project Teacher-Poets Writing to Bridge the Distance: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Poems. This oral history project emerged from a celebration of National Poetry Month in 2020 on Ethical ELA, a public website for teachers to read and write poetry and share and discover poetry lessons for their classrooms. Over the thirty days of April 2020, 50 teachers from 22 states wrote nearly 1500 poems.

After writing poetry online for 30 days together, several teachers noticed that this body of poetry held experiences and perspectives necessary to the historical record of the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers’ voices needed to be heard and documented. Out of this realization was developed this oral history project to document the shared and diverse experiences that emerged through and around the intersection of writing poetry and teaching during this unprecedented pandemic.

About the Book

In June 2021, Project Lead, Dr. Sarah J. Donovan coordinated efforts to publish Bridge the Distance: An Oral History of COVID-19 in Poems through the Oklahoma State University Library under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

You can access this publication online, or purchase your own printed copy: https://open.library.okstate.edu/bridgethedistance/ 

View the Collection

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Contact Us

Oklahoma Oral History Research Program
207 Edmon Low Library
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, OK 74078
Phone: 405-744-7685
liboh@okstate.edu

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