Susan G Barber

Revealing the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction longlist - Women's Prize

And the TBR list continues to grow . . .

American sonnets with Terrance Hayes #TeachLivingPoets

"My choosing not to use AI as a tool is not because I don’t understand it, but rather it’s because I do understand it."

🙏 from @susangbarber.bsky.social

muchadoaboutteaching.com/developing-a...

Productive weekend working with NCTE members to developed a framework for AI. Stay tuned . . .

Hello, LA! The Last Bookstore has been on my list for years and it did not disappoint!

Hello, Chicago!

I sat in a PD today where teachers were told about an tool to upload notes/articles that we can then assign to students to ask AI to find evidence from the assigned resources and explain what that evidence means.
No thanks - I’ll continue to teach students how to read and think for themselves.

Using @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social to spark our thinking on why and how we read. #aplit

LOLOL

Introducing analysis today #aplit

It’s part of our district’s “back to the basics” initiative.

Correct - t acgers are supposed to do this for ALL of their preps.

We’re supposed to have all of this on our board daily. Does this seem excessive???

Bots Over Books In Which OpenAI and Canvas Steal from Real Artists—and Children—for their Mediocre Group Project, and the Schools Give them an “A”

Some thoughts on the Instructure/OpenAI partnership.

open.substack.com/pub/zachczai...

First day of school!!

Opinion | I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students.

The Seductions of A.I. for the Writer’s Mind www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/o...

One of my favorite getting to know you and back to school activities to do with students! #EduSky

Inside prison walls, here's how a book program is changing lives Accessing reading material in prisons is hard, but Freedom Reads co-founder Reginald Betts, a former inmate, went beyond books, creating libraries made by former prisoners.

Inside prison walls, here's how a book program is changing lives www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/...

Life has a way of pushing through in the dark but it may ignore the laws of nature and not seem unnatural - even unexplainable - like "a congress of stinks!" Let's keep breathing and stink it up, friends, because life feels dark now. #PoemADayJuly

Then bookended with "Nothing would give up life" - extending beyond not sleeping but clinging to life in the dark, damp, dank space. Even the very soil the roots are growing in is breathing. #PoemADayJuly

"Root Cellar" - I love how the poem is opened with "Nothing would sleep" before diving into imagery - this really gives the sense of life in this dark space - and somewhat sinister - disobeying in a way because the things in the cellar are ignoring the laws of life by not sleeping #PoemADayJuly

Highly recommend!!

“The stretches of highway on the long drive home after burial.” - for sure feeling this both literally and figuratively as we buried my mom in Alabama 2 months ago then drove home to Georgia. Again a reminder that poetry stands in the gap when we lack the words. #PoemADayJuly

YESSSSS

Day 3: "One river gives/Its journey to the next" - I like this framing of the poem. A river makes giving a fluid act - not act(s) in isolation. The giving of the colors and the combination of them (again think of a moving river) emphasizes how giving naturally changes all involved. #PoemADayJuly

I love the connection between the last lines of yesterday and today’s poems.
Also the zooming from big ideas (pull toward brink, time for everything) to small details (agave, persimmon, stick ball, purple okra) is so grounding for me. #PoemADayJuly

Today's poem is such a great way to kick off #PoemADayJuly. I have loved reading all of the commentary, but for me today, I just read and took it all in. No annotations.

I'm not in a super reflective place yet, just resting for now, but the big takeaway from this year is "say less." Not like how my teenagers mean it, but literally saying less. No more long explainy emails trying to soften what I need to say. Same in person.

#amwriting

Looking forward to this - who else is in??