Available Now!

Years in the works,
Building a Book, Binding a Poem
is now available at your favorite
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About This Book

Written by two teaching artists, Building a Book, Binding a Poem presents a strong case for incorporating book arts into various areas of the curriculum. The authors provide descriptive poetry lessons, explicit directions for constructing books, as well as theoretical underpinnings for introducing these activities in the classroom. With numerous illustrations, the book includes a dozen structured projects, more than fifteen ways to create visual environments on paper, and numerous creative writing prompts.

The book is directed towards teachers of middle and high school-aged students, and explores the reasons why making artists’ books can fortify literacy both for visual and verbal learners. Written by two experienced artists who have conducted numerous school residencies and teacher workshops over the past 15 years, Building a Book, Binding a Poem demystifies the tasks of writing poetry and creating books in a conversational tone and accessible format.

Advance Praise for Building a Book, Binding a Poem

Kennedy and Abrams-Morley have provided teachers and lovers of word and image with a terrifically useful book! Building a Book, Binding a Poem is at once pedagogically grounded and aesthetically beautiful. While experts bemoan the so-called “death of the book,” these authors have shown how the book and the poem are relevant to students’ lives today as multi-modal literacies. To craft a poem and a book with Kennedy and Abrams-Morley is to participate in a hybrid literacy of content and form, much like the graphic novels, blogs, media, wikis, and fan-fiction with which 21^st Century youth readily engage.

Diane Downer Anderson
Acting Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and
Associate Professor, Dept. of Educational Studies
Swarthmore College

About The Authors

Now a full-time calligrapher and book artist, Meg Kennedy majored in creative writing at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland and worked as a both a staff writer and freelance writer at five university presses for twenty-five years after college. She has created forty-seven unique and limited edition artists’ books and more than a hundred calligraphic broadsides. Her work has garnered awards in lettering arts exhibitions throughout the Delaware Valley and her three-volume piece, Wings, was selected by the Guild of Book Workers to tour in a three-year exhibit that visited twelve galleries across the United States.

Liz Abrams-Morley is the author of the full-length poetry collection Learning to Calculate the Half Life, (Zinka Press, 2001) and two chapbooks including What Winter Reveals, (Plan B Press, 2005.) Her second full-length collection, Necessary Turns, is due out from Word Press in 2010. She has collaborated with Ms. Kennedy on two limited edition artists’ books. Liz’s poems and short stories have appeared in a variety of nationally distributed journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA from Vermont College, and is on the MFA in Creative Writing faculty at Rosemont College.