“talking with my students about language” by Teresa Mei Chuc

talking with my students about language

if each word is an atom
sentences — elements and compounds
paragraphs — molecules

what will you create?
a tree?
a bomb?
a bird?

Teresa Mei Chuc

Poet Laureate of Altadena, California, 2018 to 2020, Teresa Mei Chuc is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012), Keeper of the Winds (FootHills Publishing, 2014), and Invisible Light (Many Voices Press, 2018). She was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and immigrated to the U.S. under political asylum with her mother and brother shortly after the Vietnam War, while her father remained in a Vietcong “reeducation” camp for nine years. Her poetry appears in journals such as Consequence Magazine, EarthSpeak Magazine, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Kyoto Journal, Poet Lore, Rattle, and in anthologies such as With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century (West End Press, 2014) and Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees (W.W. Norton, 2017). Teresa is a graduate of the Masters in Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, and teaches literature and writing at a public high school in Los Angeles.

Headshot: Joseph Paz Dominguez

Photo Credit: Mathew Haddad