The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
Banned book writing prompts.
Matthew Burgess
In Banned Book Writing Prompts, a new series in Teachers & Writers Magazine , we aim to push back against the growing movement to censor what students can read and to show what happens when we enthusiastically embrace banned works rather than fear them. You can read an introduction to this series by Susan Karwoska here , and you can find more Banned Book Writing Prompts here . Also in the magazine: “ The Braver We Become: A Conversation with Elizabeth Acevedo .”
I had been teaching “Literature for Young People” at Brooklyn College for several years, and I needed to shake up the syllabus. I asked one of my graduate students to recommend a contemporary YA novel, and he immediately suggested The Poet X . “I think you’ll really love it,” he said, and with this encouragement, I dove in.
It didn’t take long for me to become immersed in Elizabeth Acevedo’s gorgeous, pitch-perfect novel-in-verse. Her protagonist, Xiomara Batista, is a high school sophomore in Harlem navigating conflicting feelings about religion, love, family, and self-expression. The typical plot points of a coming-of-age story appear, and in Acevedo’s masterful hands, every twist and turn feels genuine. I devoured it in two days and immediately swapped it into my syllabus for the following semester at Brooklyn College.
Could you imagine if, at 13, you read a book about a young Hispanic girl navigating through almost exactly the same issues as you did? All that anger, frustration, confusion, and insecurity would have been maybe a bit easier to work through.
I was especially moved by the vivid descriptions of the poetry classroom as a sanctuary and creative laboratory. Acevedo describes this space—a space I cherish—with great authenticity. Over the years I’ve seen what poetry can do, the way it can alchemize young people and help bring out their voices. I was excited to see this represented in The Poet X .
Acevedo’s dedication, which precedes the opening poem, is “To Katherine Bolaños and my former students at Buck Lodge Middle School 2010–2012, and all the little sisters yearning to see themselves: this is for you.” With this, Acevedo makes one of her intentions explicit: to offer a “mirror” to young women of color who have been underrepresented in literature for young people for so long. I’ve been teaching The Poet X consistently for several years now, and my students’ responses provide the most moving and eloquent testimony about the importance of this reflection. I’ve asked and received permission from two students to share excerpts from their writing.
In her reading response titled “Sisters with Voices,” Jessica Sheppard writes:
Ahhh, another home run for the brown girls who preferred sneakers over sandals and open mouths with closed fists. Xiomara feels like a home girl I knew growing up, one who my mom wouldn’t have wanted me hanging out with because, “we cause trouble when we’re together.” But I sneak around with her anyway, because I need her. I need to know that there are other girls out there who take a lot of hits and talk a lot of shit. I need to feel her fear, so that I may give myself permission to acknowledge my own. I need to see her tears, because I need proof that it’s okay for strong girls to cry. More importantly, I need to know that if you do the tears won’t melt the tough shell that took so long to build in the first place. Xiomara is my friend, my sister. We talk on the phone and muse about all of things we see and want and hope to have for ourselves. We push past one another’s protective exteriors to open ourselves up to what we know will be a tender, sometimes painful exchange of stories, experiences, laughs, and questions about who we are, where we have been, and the fact that neither of us is really sure where we’ll go. [. . .] Xiomara’s is a story that speaks to so many people’s experiences, but I’d like to think that this coming-of-age tale is especially triumphant to women of color who are bold and bright enough to speak, even before they’re spoken to.
Another student, Briana Pascascio, a graduate student working on her degree in education, created a final project about The Poet X in the form of an extended multimedia letter to her younger self. In an introductory passage, she writes:
But could you imagine if, at 13, you read a book about a young Hispanic girl navigating through almost exactly the same issues as you did? All that anger, frustration, confusion, and insecurity would have been maybe a bit easier to work through. Maybe, you would have gained your confidence years earlier or a better way to express yourself beyond just listening to music and coded journaling. Well, I’d like to share something with you. You discover (and are also assigned) a verse named The Poet X written by Elizabeth Acevedo and, in two days, you complete the book and all your 28-year-old brain could think was, “Wow! This was me.” And your mind reeled with how different you might have felt if this novel was written 10 years earlier and mom borrowed the book from the library for you to read. Through reading this book, you discover the 13-year-old you who, in a way, still needed this book. Then you realize that you will make sure you have all kinds of literature in your future English classroom that causes all the different walks of life in your class to feel seen. But, to circle back to you, who realized how much you still needed this novel, I will share with you the moments in the novel you needed the most.
These beautiful testimonies demonstrate the power of Acevedo’s story to inspire, to encourage, to comfort, and to summon inner reserves of strength and creativity. You also can see how Acevedo’s writing provides a platform for student writing. Like all great art, it quickens our own creative impulse to act and create in response.
The idea of banning a book as beautiful as this one, as necessary as this one, feels outrageous to me. As in: rage-inducing, appalling. Since I first included The Poet X on my syllabus, students have received this book as a balm, a blessing, and a lifeline. Again and again they say, this is a book that would have made the younger me feel less alone, more empowered. May those of us in the position of sharing books like these offer them to the readers who need them most.
Writing Prompt 1
The gaps between drafts: encouraging creativity & authenticity.
Given that Elizabeth Acevedo was once a middle-school teacher, and to this day leads writing workshops with young people, I think the writing prompts included in The Poet X are all worth sharing. In five instances throughout the book, we encounter a writing prompt given by Xiamora’s English teacher, Ms. Galiano. First we read the “rough draft” of Xiamora’s response to the assignment, and then we see her final draft, what she “actually turns in.” Acevedo offers this glimpse into the ways in which students alter, erase, or flatten their voices into a form that feels more acceptable, more “teacher friendly.” By offering the unfiltered “rough draft” beside the more formal and decidedly less lively “final draft,” we see this code-shifting process play out.
Take a look at one or more of Xiomara’s rough drafts and compare them with the accompanying final draft: Have you noticed a similar dynamic playing out in your own writing? How might your writing look, and feel, and sound, if you were given the permission to be more yourself or more creatively free? What is the line between code-shifting and self-censorship?
Following Xiomara’s example, respond to one of the writing prompts below, from The Poet X, with a “rough” version free of any constraints whatsoever, and a “final” version that conforms to your perceived preferences of a teacher or professor. Then compare the differences between the two as a means of exploring how code-shifting can limit creativity.
Assignment 1: Write about the most impactful day of your life. Assignment 2: Last Paragraphs of My Biography Assignment 3: Describe someone you consider misunderstood by society. Assignment 4: When was the last time you felt free? Assignment 5: Explain Your Favorite Quote
Writing Prompt 2
Making “place” pop on the page.
Read the very first poem in the book, “Stoop Sitting,” and notice how Acevedo evokes the setting through vivid description, or what I call with my younger students, “delicious details.” What lines create images in your mind?
Now think of a place you’ve lived or a place you know well, whether it’s your own block or stoop, or some outdoor spot of your choice. A meditation can be helpful here: try closing your eyes and envisioning what you see, hear, smell, and feel, followed by a free-write to gather these impressions, in note form, on the page. Set a timer for 7–15 minutes and write a draft of a poem using “Stoop-Sitting” as a model. If you prefer more structure, you can begin each stanza with some or all of Acevedo’s verbs:
I scope out . . . Peep . . . Listen to . . . Laugh at . . . Shake my head as . . .
Writing Prompt 3
“let’s talk about line breaks”.
After teaching The Poet X at Brooklyn College for the first time, I reached out to Elizabeth Acevedo for an interview with Teachers & Writers Magazine . Here is a short excerpt from one exchange:
Matthew: When reading The Poet X , I was struck by your line breaks and the way you negotiate the page. Do you have any strategies for teaching that level of craft with students? Elizabeth : This is my favorite question. I’m like, “Let’s talk about line breaks!”
What follows this exchange is a helpful consideration about the various elements that influence a poet’s placement of line and stanza on the page, including pacing, breath, and emphasis. When I was first writing free verse poems, I wondered about these elements of craft and hungered for opportunities to explore them, and to this day, I enjoy examining the effects of spacing and enjambment with my students.
To start, take some time to explore a few of the poems in The Poet X where the line breaks create noticeable effects. For example, you might begin with a quieter example in “Warmth,” a poem about Xiomara holding hands with her crush, Aman. Read the poem aloud to demonstrate the subtle effects of the spacing in these lines:
We are silent the whole walk. Without words we are in agreement that we’ll walk as far as we can this way: my hand held in his held in his coat pocket. Each of us keeping the other warm against the quiet chill.
When I recently discussed this poem with my class at Brooklyn College, one student noted the way the alliterative “w” brings emphasis to the intimacy of these two young individuals who are beginning to become a “we.” Then I asked: what do we make of the additional spaces in the line beginning “my hand”? Someone pointed out that it slows the pace and makes the reader focus in on the held hands. Another observed that these spaces evoke the heartbeat, and in this way, we feel the “racing heart” of the poem’s speaker in this moment of intimacy and touch.
A more dramatic example arrives later in the two consecutive poems “Ants” and “I Am No Ant,” which depict of an intense moment of confrontation between Xiomara and her mother. In the first, the poem steps down the page with one word per line:
In this example, the shape of the lines mimics the downward motion as Xiomara’s mother forces her daughter to kneel and pray for forgiveness. In response, Xiomara tries “to make an ant of [her]self.” When I asked my students to reflect on the ways in which the form of this poem is connected to the content , they identified the connection between the descending lines and the pulling, as well as the way the isolation of each word on its own line gives the visual impression of ants.
For this writing prompt, I invite you to make your own exploration of the relationship between form and content. Here are two possibilities:
1. Write a poem about an early encounter with a crush or a first love, using present tense and vivid imagery. Following Acevedo’s example, look for places in the poem where the line breaks and/or spacing can heighten reader’s identification with the poem’s speaker.
2. Write a poem about a conflict with a parent, sibling, or friend. Experiment with the placement of the words on the page so that the shape of the poem captures and transmits some of the intensity of the conflict.
Further Reading: “ The Braver We Become: A Conversation with Elizabeth Acevedo ” by Matthew Burgess. Books Unbanned e-library cards are available nationwide to teens and young adults, ages 13 and up, and allow access to the library’s full e-book collection, where you can find many of the titles written about in this series. You can apply for a Books Unbanned Library Card at the Brooklyn Public Library and the Seattle Public Library .
Matthew Burgess is an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College. He is the author of eight children's books, most recently The Red Tin Box (Chronicle) and Sylvester’s Letter (ELB). Matthew has edited an anthology of visual art and writing titled Dream Closet: Meditations on Childhood Space (Secretary Press), as well as a collection of essays titled Spellbound: The Art of Teaching Poetry (T&W). More books are forthcoming, including: As Edward Imagined: A Story of Edward Gorey (Knopf, 2024), Words With Wings & Magic Things (Tundra, 2025), and Fireworks (Harper Collins, 2024). A poet-in-residence in New York City public schools since 2001, Matthew serves as a contributing editor of Teachers & Writers Magazine .
Related Posts
- study guides
- lesson plans
- homework help
Poet X Lesson Plans for Teachers
Teaching Poet X
The Poet X lesson plan contains a variety of teaching materials that cater to all learning styles. Inside you'll find 30 Daily Lessons, 20 Fun Activities, 180 Multiple Choice Questions, 60 Short Essay Questions, 20 Essay Questions, Quizzes/Homework Assignments, Tests, and more. The lessons and activities will help students gain an intimate understanding of the text, while the tests and quizzes will help you evaluate how well the students have grasped the material. View a free sample
Target Grade: 7th-12th (Middle School and High School)
Length of Lesson Plan: Approximately 156 pages. Page count is estimated at 300 words per page. Length will vary depending on format viewed.
Browse The Poet X Lesson Plan:
Full Lesson Plan Overview
Completely customizable.
The Poet X lesson plan is downloadable in PDF and Word. The Word file is viewable with any PC or Mac and can be further adjusted if you want to mix questions around and/or add your own headers for things like "Name," "Period," and "Date." The Word file offers unlimited customizing options so that you can teach in the most efficient manner possible. Once you download the file, it is yours to keep and print for your classroom. View a FREE sample
Lesson Plan Calendars
The Lesson Plan Calendars provide daily suggestions about what to teach. They include detailed descriptions of when to assign reading, homework, in-class work, fun activities, quizzes, tests and more. Use the entire Poet X calendar, or supplement it with your own curriculum ideas. Calendars cover one, two, four, and eight week units. Determine how long your Poet X unit will be, then use one of the calendars provided to plan out your entire lesson.
Chapter Abstracts
Chapter abstracts are short descriptions of events that occur in each chapter of Poet X . They highlight major plot events and detail the important relationships and characteristics of important characters. The Chapter Abstracts can be used to review what the students have read, or to prepare the students for what they will read. Hand the abstracts out in class as a study guide, or use them as a "key" for a class discussion. They are relatively brief, but can serve to be an excellent refresher of Poet X for either a student or teacher.
Character and Object Descriptions
Character and Object Descriptions provide descriptions of the significant characters as well as objects and places in Poet X . These can be printed out and used as an individual study guide for students, a "key" for leading a class discussion, a summary review prior to exams, or a refresher for an educator. The character and object descriptions are also used in some of the quizzes and tests in this lesson plan. The longest descriptions run about 200 words. They become shorter as the importance of the character or object declines.
Daily Lessons
This section of the lesson plan contains 30 Daily Lessons. Daily Lessons each have a specific objective and offer at least three (often more) ways to teach that objective. Lessons include classroom discussions, group and partner activities, in-class handouts, individual writing assignments, at least one homework assignment, class participation exercises and other ways to teach students about Poet X in a classroom setting. You can combine daily lessons or use the ideas within them to create your own unique curriculum. They vary greatly from day to day and offer an array of creative ideas that provide many options for an educator.
Fun Classroom Activities
Fun Classroom Activities differ from Daily Lessons because they make "fun" a priority. The 20 enjoyable, interactive classroom activities that are included will help students understand Poet X in fun and entertaining ways. Fun Classroom Activities include group projects, games, critical thinking activities, brainstorming sessions, writing poems, drawing or sketching, and countless other creative exercises. Many of the activities encourage students to interact with each other, be creative and think "outside of the box," and ultimately grasp key concepts from the text by "doing" rather than simply studying. Fun activities are a great way to keep students interested and engaged while still providing a deeper understanding of Poet X and its themes.
Essay Questions/Writing Assignments
These 20 Essay Questions/Writing Assignments can be used as essay questions on a test, or as stand-alone essay topics for a take-home or in-class writing assignment on Poet X . Students should have a full understanding of the unit material in order to answer these questions. They often include multiple parts of the work and ask for a thorough analysis of the overall text. They nearly always require a substantial response. Essay responses are typically expected to be one (or more) page(s) and consist of multiple paragraphs, although it is possible to write answers more briefly. These essays are designed to challenge a student's understanding of the broad points in a work, interactions among the characters, and main points and themes of the text. But, they also cover many of the other issues specific to the work and to the world today.
Short Essay Questions
The 60 Short Essay Questions listed in this section require a one to two sentence answer. They ask students to demonstrate a deeper understanding of Poet X by describing what they've read, rather than just recalling it. The short essay questions evaluate not only whether students have read the material, but also how well they understand and can apply it. They require more thought than multiple choice questions, but are shorter than the essay questions.
Multiple Choice Questions
The 180 Multiple Choice Questions in this lesson plan will test a student's recall and understanding of Poet X . Use these questions for quizzes, homework assignments or tests. The questions are broken out into sections, so they focus on specific chapters within Poet X . This allows you to test and review the book as you proceed through the unit. Typically, there are 5-15 questions per chapter, act or section.
Evaluation Forms
Use the Oral Reading Evaluation Form when students are reading aloud in class. Pass the forms out before you assign reading, so students will know what to expect. You can use the forms to provide general feedback on audibility, pronunciation, articulation, expression and rate of speech. You can use this form to grade students, or simply comment on their progress.
Use the Writing Evaluation Form when you're grading student essays. This will help you establish uniform criteria for grading essays even though students may be writing about different aspects of the material. By following this form you will be able to evaluate the thesis, organization, supporting arguments, paragraph transitions, grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. of each student's essay.
Quizzes/Homework Assignments
The Quizzes/Homework Assignments are worksheets that can be used in a variety of ways. They pull questions from the multiple choice and short essay sections, the character and object descriptions, and the chapter abstracts to create worksheets that can be used for pop quizzes, in-class assignments and homework. Periodic homework assignments and quizzes are a great way to encourage students to stay on top of their assigned reading. They can also help you determine which concepts and ideas your class grasps and which they need more guidance on. By pulling from the different sections of the lesson plan, quizzes and homework assignments offer a comprehensive review of Poet X in manageable increments that are less substantial than a full blown test.
Use the Test Summary page to determine which pre-made test is most relevant to your students' learning styles. This lesson plan provides both full unit tests and mid-unit tests. You can choose from several tests that include differing combinations of multiple choice questions, short answer questions, short essay questions, full essay questions, character and object matching, etc. Some of the tests are designed to be more difficult than others. Some have essay questions, while others are limited to short-response questions, like multiple choice, matching and short answer questions. If you don't find the combination of questions that best suits your class, you can also create your own test on Poet X .
Create Your Own Quiz or Test
You have the option to Create Your Own Quiz or Test. If you want to integrate questions you've developed for your curriculum with the questions in this lesson plan, or you simply want to create a unique test or quiz from the questions this lesson plan offers, it's easy to do. Cut and paste the information from the Create Your Own Quiz or Test page into a Word document to get started. Scroll through the sections of the lesson plan that most interest you and cut and paste the exact questions you want to use into your new, personalized Poet X lesson plan.
(read more)
FOLLOW BOOKRAGS:
by Elizabeth Acevedo
The poet x themes, taking ownership of self.
The process of maturing through adolescence is inevitably intertwined with the idea of taking ownership of oneself. In Xiomara 's case this process is compounded by having parents—a mother in particular—who are very strict, religious, and old-fashioned. She wants to be, and finds herself for a time, in a society which affirms and supports her individuality and empowers her femininity, rather than restricting it. In the most defiant and bold act of her young adult life Xiomara refuses to ask for forgiveness because she feels no shame for having pursued Aman or her poetry. As she takes charge of her own life, she feels less and less need to follow her parents' Catholicism. She does not reject the religion, but Xiomara makes her decisions according to her own value system and her own conscience.
Practicing Vulnerability
As a teenage girl, Xiomara is prone to emotional angst. Developmentally speaking, high school kids are learning to process their radically shifting emotions, often on their own, in high-pressure situations. Xiomara responds to this challenge with an incredible amount of maturity. Through poetry club and her budding friendships, she learns to express her feelings within a constructive framework. She intentionally cultivates vulnerability. This is why she is so outraged and crushed when her mother finds her poetry and destroy it. For Xiomara, these poems are a part of herself, one which her parents are readily rejecting because they believe they can simply throw it away and be done with it. If Xiomara cannot just destroy her feelings and experiences, then she must learn to accept them somehow, even without the support of her parents. Although this sort of transformation is often typified in literature and popular culture as melodrama or awkwardness, it is an important life stage which Xiomara navigates with a surprising amount of skill.
Rejecting Sexism
Much of Xiomara's conflict with her parents revolves around sexism. Because she has her twin brother, Xavier , with whom to compare, she is especially conscious of how her parents treat her differently because she's a girl. Not only do they impose different, stricter rules upon her, they also encourage certain behaviors in their son which they forbid for Xiomara. For instance, she is not allowed to pursue any sort of romantic relationship, but Xavier has no such restriction. When Xiomara kisses Aman, she is dragged into church and told to confess to the priest. This moment represents a pinnacle in her personal development because Xiomara is being asked to make a profession of values, and she chooses her own instead of her parents'. She refuses to confess because she rejects the idea that she has made a mistake in kissing Aman.
Art as Liberation
Throughout the novel Xiomara struggles with her mother's repressiveness, her changing body and relationship with boys, her religious doubts, and much more, but the one constant is that for her, art is liberation, catharsis. She is constantly writing, as writing is the only way she can truly get her voice out there into the world (initially it is a private endeavor, but eventually she does start to perform for others). Her writing is what sustains her and keeps her sane and grounded; it helps her understand who she is and what she wants. Acevedo uses her novel not just to tell the story of a vibrant young woman but to make the case that art is a powerful release and palliative.
Immigrants and their Children
Mami and Papi are from the Dominican Republic and retain some of their culture and customs from that country, while their children are born in the United States and almost fully embrace that country's way of life. This is an age-old story—the immigrants who are the first to arrive struggle to find their way in their new home and their children who are born here do not understand why their parents are so old-fashioned or different or unwilling to assimilate into the new country. Combined with Mami's religiosity, this situation proves to be very difficult for young Xiomara as she struggles to define herself.
Religion is not necessarily a positive part of Xiomara's life. Her mother's Catholicism manifests itself as an extremely strict, judgemental, and repressive religion. Xiomara struggles with whether or not she even believes the Bible's stories, but also with the way the Bible and its adherents treat women. She feels like Jesus is a friend she no longer wants to talk to anymore, that confirmation class is a waste of time, and that the things she is told are wrong with her are simply normal aspects of being a human being. Acevedo does not totally condemn religion, showing Father Sean as a kind and supportive person and some of the Bible's teachings as uplifting and nurturing, but she does give the reader a lot to ponder in terms of how human beings wield religion to make life difficult for others.
Xiomara and Xavier are twins, but their relationship isn't always the stuff of twin-legend. Xiomara often wishes Twin understood her better, that they had deeper twin intuition, that he would stand up for her when she was suffering, that he would simply notice her more. This isn't to say that there are not moments in the text when there is something that passes between them, and they definitely love and support each other, but Xiomara often feels adrift even though she is supposed to have this person who understands her on a deeper level. Part of this can be attributed to their differing genders and the way they are treated—Xavier is favored by his parents, has to do less work, does not get in trouble and escapes the constant monitoring Xiomara receives. As the novel progresses, Xiomara comes to terms with the fact that she cannot turn solely to Twin for succor and sympathy.
The Poet X Questions and Answers
The Question and Answer section for The Poet X is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.
Which of the following quotes most clearly shows the author's attitude about church?
Are you providing the quotes?
What are 6 important events in order?
Are you asking for bullet points for one particular poem, or for bullet points using the collection?
poet x ''poem Ms.Galiano''
Sorry, what is acevedo?
Study Guide for The Poet X
The Poet X study guide contains a biography of Acevado, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
- About The Poet X
- The Poet X Summary
- Character List
Essays for The Poet X
The Poet X essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Poet X by Acevado.
- Discovering Self Worth through Spoken Word in "The Poet X"
- Elizabeth Acevedo’s Ode to Adolescent Power: Culture, Conflict, and Reassurance in The Poet X