Get to know the Get Lit Players—a group of teens who use poetry to take on the world—with this standards-based book that sheds light on teen issues through their own poetry and slam poetry performances.

Get Lit Rising brings to life the true story of nineteen teen poets (the Get Lit Players) who are inspiring thousands of teens across the country through their award-winning performances of classic and spoken word poems. This book takes readers inside the private lives of these teen poets as they try to transform the lives of inner city teens in some of the toughest life circumstances. The Get Lit Players include teens who struggle with homelessness, autism, incarceration, body image, depression, and more. But they use the power of poetry to reclaim their lives and influence their friends, families, and communities.

This uplifting book also offers the classic poems that have most inspired the Get Lit Players, along with their own personal response poems, and each chapter offers questions, writing prompts, and how-tos for readers to set their own inner poet free. Ending with a section for parents and educators featuring the curriculum that’s already in schools throughout California, this slam-dunk shows how to get teens excited about poetry and how to create poetry groups and slams in their own communities. Unless you’re a fellow teenager reading the high-school poets featured in this anthology-cum-manual, you
may find their output a bit juvenile—a critique in no way leveled at the young creators, most of whom
have already overcome extremely challenging life scripts. Executive director Lane introduced her poetry
program—in which a student chooses a resonant poem, memorizes it, writes a response, and then performs
both—in LA schools in 2006; it now reaches some 20,000 young people and boasts an astounding track
record. Lane exults: “98 percent of our Get Lit Players [an elite corps chosen by audition] go on to college,
70 percent with merit-based scholarships.” Here a score or so budding writers tell their life stories, their
essays followed by their chosen poem and original response, plus thematic prompts that encourage the
reader to try writing themselves. Asking an adolescent to relate “the story of me” is an open invitation to
navel-gazing, but age-mates will find a wealth of relatable material and the occasional gem of a liberating
insight. — Sandy MacDonald