A book of poems and the teachers who love them, Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach is a collection for and about passionate educators who continue to be inspired by poetry in their teaching. The collection includes eighty-eight poems from poets such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, William Carlos Williams, Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, and Nikki Giovanni, among others. Each poem is accompanied by a vignette from a teacher explaining the poem’s significance to them. The collection concludes with an essay, “Tending the Fire: The Utility of Poetry in a Teacher’s Life,” by Sam M. Intrator.

Intractor, who’s an assistant professor of education and child study at Smith College and the author of Tuned In and Fired Up: How Teaching Can Inspire Real Learning in the Classroom, is coeditor of Teaching with Fire with Megan Scribner, a freelance writer, editor, and program evaluator.

Teaching with Fire also includes a brief introduction by Parker J. Palmer, author and founder of the Courage to Teach program and the Center for Courage & Renewal, and Tom Vander Ark, executive director of education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.