Poetic Education and the Practice of Freedom

Sonya Posmentier, associate professor of English at New York University, invites audience members to consider Civil Rights Movement activism as instances of both civic and poetic education.

We often think of learning to read poetry as something that happens through classroom lectures and textbooks. Instead, a parallel pedagogy was unfolding during the Mississippi summer project of 1964. In this lecture, Posmentier offers a glimpse of education that centers Black traditions of poetry, song and folklore; Black interpretive strategies; and Black alternative teaching practices in the context of fierce battles over who gets to learn, how, and where.

This is the Ridge lecture and is part of The Huntington Research 2025–2026 "Active in the Archive" lecture series.