It’s official now, so I can tell those of you who have been wondering why I have been curiously silent on e-mail the past week or so: I have been hard at work! I’ll be teaching an Introduction to Poetry class at UNC this fall… I start my course on August 24.

I worked so hard after leaving the high school English classroom to reform myself, but apparently I just can’t shake the urge to seek out young minds and fill them with thoughts about poetry. If you’ve been reading along with this blog, you’ve seen some of the poems I’ve been thinking about a great deal over the past few days; you can probably surmise that many of those have found their way into my syllabus.

I’ve long held that the greatest way you could possibly ever thank the teachers who shaped you (short of immense fiscal remuneration, which I will also gladly accept in the future) is to take what you have learned, expand upon it, and teach it with passion equal to or greater than that of your teachers. I’ve been very lucky over the years to be paired with like-minded instructors on many levels, friends and teachers who share my peculiar interests and understand and support some of my poetic obsessions. In the past few months, before the opportunity to teach at UNC arose, I found myself increasingly grateful to the teachers who shared their wisdom about poetry with me. I am infinitely more grateful to them now, and hope to do justice to their teaching over the next semester.

–Donald Justice