Expand Your Mind with Poetry

Writing poetry is relevant, absorbing and mind-expanding - and you can prove it to your students with this accessible two-book series. Lively and informative, Expand Your Mind with Poetry guides students through the writing process with guidelines, examples and activities from which they can build their own skills with poetry. Completing each unit can involve a mix of individual, pair, group and whole-class work, depending on the nature of the task and student needs. Book 1 equips students with poetic resources that they can put to good use in writing the thematic poetry that Book 2 inspires.

Ages: 11-14 years

Expand Your Mind with Poetry Book 1
Expand Your Mind with Poetry Book 2

About the Authors

Picture of Alan Chamberlain

Alan Chamberlain

Alan Chamberlain was educated in Australia (University of Sydney) and in France (University of Paris-Sorbonne). He taught French and English in New South Wales before teacing and studying at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He then worked as Associate Professor in French at the University of New South Wales and as Associate Professor in Language Education at the University of Brunei. He has also worked as an ESL/ESOL teacher trainer in Singapore and China. He is the author of a number of French textbooks in Australia and France and books on the teaching of poetry (with Vaughan Rapatahana) in New Zealand and Hong Kong.
Picture of Vaughan Rapatahana

Vaughan Rapatahana

Vaughan Rapatahana (Te Ätiawa) commutes between homes in Hong Kong, Philippines, and Aotearoa New Zealand. He is widely published across several genre in both his main languages, te reo Mäori and English and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, Spanish.

He earned a Ph. D from the University of Auckland with a thesis about Colin Wilson and writes extensively about Wilson. Rapatahana is a critic of the agencies of English language proliferation and the consequent decimation of indigenous tongues, inaugurating and co-editing English language as Hydra and Why English? Confronting the Hydra (Multilingual Matters, Bristol, UK, 2012 and 2016).

He is also a poet, with eight collections published in Hong Kong SAR; Macau; Philippines; USA; England; France, India, and Aotearoa New Zealand. Atonement (UST Press, Manila) was nominated for a National Book Award in Philippines (2016); he won the inaugural Proverse Poetry Prize the same year; and was included in Best New Zealand Poems (2017).

In July 2018, he participated in the Hauterives Literary Festival in France. In September 2019, he participated in the World Poetry Recital Night, in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia. In October 2019, he participated in the Poetry International Festival at The Southbank Centre, London. He also appeared at the Medellin Poetry Festival in Colombia during August 2021,

Rapatahana is one of the few World authors who consistently writes in and is published in te reo Mäori (the Mäori language). It is his mission to continue to do so and to push for a far wider recognition of the need to write and to be published in this tongue.

New Zealand Book Council Writers File is https://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writer/rapatahana-vaugh