Alaska Statewide Special Education Conference 2022

The art of poetry can be so healing and cathartic!

Through Mark’s journey as a young man with disabilities to a teacher of students with disabilities, he has employed the medium of poetry to express and explain emotions that are sometimes unexplainable in everyday conversations.

When Mark was an undergraduate English major, he developed a significant stutter that made speaking exasperating; however, he discovered a love for writing, poetry specifically, that served as an outlet for his inner most thoughts, loves, and emotions. At this time, poetry became the first “love of his life.”

Once Mark began teaching students with disabilities, his shift in his writing metamorphosed into writing about disabilities, whether his own or those of his students, which often were intertwined.

This allowed Mark to combine poetry with the second “love of his life”: Teaching.

As Mark developed as a special education teacher and as an adult with disabilities, his poems evolved as well. In his first publication, Fingerprints (Turning Point Press), Mark writes about the power of perseverance in surmounting disabilities as well as the successes of his students in dealing with many life and school adversities. Mark has also had select poems published in the following literary journals: Pilgrimage, Volney Road Review, and The Awakenings Review. He is currently working on his second collection of poems, tentatively titled, Crosshairs.

Come listen to Mark read select poems from his publication, Fingerprints, a collection of poems about him and his students overcoming disabilities, abuse, metal illness, and emotional injuries that sometimes bind us yet separate us through our own unique healing processes, as Mark writes, “You scar your way. I’ll scar mine. Recovery is its own fingerprint.”.

Have a question for Mark about his life experience? His professional experience? His work with students with disabilities or his poetry? A short Q & A will be included in this session.

Book sale-and-signing to follow. Books are $20 per copy. Cash and checks preferred.