Autumn means different things in communities around America: the return of football season, the most dangerous months of fire season in the west, or mushrooms pushing up through damp leaves in deciduous forests. For this season of moving deeper into the darker half of the year, Poetry in America shares three educational videos featuring poems by Alberto Ríos, Kay Ryan, and James Wright. The first two of these also feature guest interpreters whose primary field of expertise isn’t poetry: physician and author Ricardo Nuila looks at James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” through the lens of community health, while ecologist Serita Frey digs into the fungal science behind Kay Ryan’s “Weakness and Doubt.”
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Doctor and writer, Ricardo Nuila, on community health and belonging in “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio.”
Reading & Writing with Media
Here are some ideas for how to incorporate these videos into your classroom or writing practice:
- Knowing nonhumans: Kay Ryan and Alberto Ríos’s poems both center the experience of nonhumans. What is a mushroom’s or a jack rabbit’s experience of the world? Pick another nonhuman being you feel connected to and write a poem about what it knows, or what you are sorry or happy to know about it, in the fall.
- Community events: In James Wright’s “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” football is a big event, something that people turn to for the rest of their lives to witness. How do different individuals engage with this event differently? What does their participation reveal about them as individuals? And as members of a community?
- Write to describe a defining event in your community—a festival, sports season, parade, striking change in weather—or anything else that would give an outsider special insight into the place where you live. Why is this event important? Whom does it include? Is anyone left out? How do people feel about this event? What does this event reveal about the past and present of this place?
- If you can, share your writing with someone—from your community or from another. Talk together about the event you’ve described, or about another event in their community. How do you both feel about these events? What role do you play in them? How and why are these occasions important to the communities you belong to?
- Finally, write a poem that draws from everything you’ve learned from this exploratory writing and conversation. Your poem might continue to focus on the original community event you described, or it might make connections between events or communities.
Connected Offerings
For learners of all kinds:
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Poetry in America, PBS TV Series: Linda Hogan’s “Bear Fat” and Alberto Ríos’s “Rabbits and Fire;” Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” and Kay Ryan’s “Weakness and Doubt”
For educators and graduate students:
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Poetry in America for Teachers: Earth, Sea, Sky—four-credit, graduate-level degree course (Harvard Division of Continuing Education, next offered 2026)
For K–12 students and undergraduates:
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ASU MLFC Reading America course series (three-credit courses open to high schoolers and undergraduates): 1850–1945 (Spring 2026), American Environments (Summer 2026), The City (Fall 2026)
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Amplify ELA + Poetry in America curriculum for middle school students
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Poetry in America curricula for high school students in collaboration with the XQ Institute and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (forthcoming from ASU)