The One With Noel Quiñones

This month, I'm participating in the Slice of Life challenge with Two Writing Teachers. If you want to participate, you can link up at their Slice of Life Story Post or you can head on over there to check out other people's stories and follow along with the fun. For more information on what a Slice of Life is about, you can go here. 

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In 2015, the last time I participated in the month-long Slice of Life Challenge, I blogged about my identity and how I have connected with being Latina. My last post, The One Where I Have To Share My Stories, lists all the posts from that year. 

This year, I'm focusing on spoken word poetry and soaking up as much as I can about spoken word. I'll be sharing some of my own poetry...but first I'm looking for some mentor texts. 

I believe as teachers, we have a responsibility to give students time and encouragement to consume and create. We need to take in all sorts of media - from books to YouTube videos - and then we need to create - from books to YouTube videos. I blogged about this in my post My Thoughts on How Education Can Change the World. 

So as I start on this month of exploration and study of spoken word, I watched Noel Quiñones' 8 Confessions of My Tongue. I first saw this in the artile This Poet Powerfully Captures the Struggle of Latinos Who Can’t Speak Spanish. 

In thinking about Noel's message, I can see how it is raw and honest just like I wrote about yesterday. It sucked me in and I felt for Noel because he's so vulnerable and open about how his experience. I like how he uses the line breaks and how he incorporates them into his performance. I also like how he outlines his eight points and uses the numbers to punctuate his points.

If you have any favorite spoken word poets to tell me about, 

please share in the comments!