Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda

Dr. Laura Apol is an associate professor in Teacher Education at Michigan State University, where she specializes in issues of diversity in children’s and YA literature, global children’s literature, poetic inquiry, gender studies, and creative writing. Apol’s scholarship in the areas of literacy education, children’s and YA literature, and arts-based research methodologies has been published widely. She is the author of several prize-winning collections of poetry: Falling into Grace; Crossing the Ladder of Sun; Requiem, Rwanda (drawn from her work using writing to facilitate healing among survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and translated into Kinyarwanda under the title Emwe N’imvura Irabyibuka—Even the Rain Remembers); and Nothing but the Blood.  Her most recent work focuses on the therapeutic uses of writing and literature in response to trauma, and she currently serves as poet laureate for the Lansing area in mid-Michigan.

• 1 Going to Rwanda.- 2 Turning Research into Art: The process.- 3 Attending to Aesthetics: The art of revision.- 4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative poetry.- 5 Self, Audience and Activism: Poetry of witness.- 6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of witness.- 7 Public/Action.- 8 Poetic Respect; Poetic Letting Go.- 9 Conclusion: Engaging with the Lives of Others.