Teaching While Black

(MAin Street Rag, 2020)

Named a Must Read by the 2020 Massachusetts Book Awards

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Matthew E. Henry’s first collection f poetry is both an examination of Black bodies in white educational spaces, as well as a window into the realities of public high schools in this country by a veteran teacher.

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MEH? Hardly. Embodying a prophetic vocation, speaking in tongues, code-switching, this poet bears witness in a world of students, parents, administrators. No one in this book is a cliche. MEH reminds us by conflating trigger- with twitter-finger, the speaker is on an edge: if anger can be specific, so can humor. So can compassion. Truth.

—Jeanine Hathaway, Long after Lauds

A riveting debut from poet-educator MEH, Teaching While Black is an honest, relentless portrait of the contemporary American classroom. MEH is in conversation with the past masters of American literature: Baldwin, Brooks, DuBois, Hughes, Morrison, and, behind them, the bloody thoughts of Shakespeare himself. But it is Rilke whose words best sum up this collection: "here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life."

—Timothy E. G. Bartel, author of Aflame But Unconsumed: Poems.

In this book, MEH, a.k.a Matthew Henry, offers fascinating snapshots of teacher-student predicaments that can occur for an African American in a white system. But the book also reveals the ironies involved in exchanges between any well-educated teacher and youngsters in school. Towards the end of the book Matthew reveals his own history as a student—how it felt to be bussed and educated in the white system he has now joined. These poems are deeply moving because they are so deeply felt, so carefully, lovingly crafted.

—Jeanne Murray Walker, Author of Pilgrim, You Find the Path by Walking