Craig Crist-Evans

Teaching Pre K-8, Mar 2005 by Hopkins, Lee Bennett

This writing teacher sees poetry as a "clear and shining bridge" connecting people to their universe

Craig Crist-Evans' career as a writer of poetry for children and young adults began in 1999 with the publication of Moon Over Tennessee: A Boy's Civil War Journal (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). In the award-winning book, readers journey with a 13-year-old boy and his father from their Tennessee farm to Gettysburg where they join Confederate forces fighting there.

Poetic escape

Crist-Evans was born on March 4, 1954, in Springfield, OH. His father, a salesperson who frequently changed jobs, moved the family to Florida in 1965. "The ever-constant life changes made my home life difficult," he says. "At the age of 12, my parents sent me off to a military academy. It was there I began writing poetry - partly to escape the regimen of academy life."

Following the success of Moon Over Tennessee, Crist-Evans penned the young adult novel Amaryllis (Candlewick, 2003) and the poignant North of Everything (Candlewick, 2004), a series of lyric poems detailing a family's move from Florida to Vermont to begin life on a farm. The sequel to Moon Over Tennessee, titled The Shadow of My Father's Hand, ran as a part of a syndicated feature, "Breakfast Serials," appearing in over 100 newspapers.

Crist-Evans, now Director of the Writing Center at Mercersburg Academy in Mercersburg, PA, stated "I want to give students the knowledge that they can write - that their words are an important way to express life."

Thoughts on writing

"As for myself, as a writer of poetry, I find that poetry is discovery. Words help me find the path towards what I mean," Crist-Evans says. "When I sit down to write a poem, I don't know anything. Yet, I feel as if I'm standing at the edge of clear and shining bridge between the universe and me. Everything is possible. I have only to find the words, like steps along a bridge, that let me go anywhere.

"I tell myself and I tell my students that poetry is energy and music. A poem is a little word machine that requires us to take a deep breath and speak out loud. Let the words become music, and listen. The meaning of the poem is the melody of its spoken sound on the breath, the thing you hum when you've forgotten the words.

Remember how the music makes you feel and you will remember the poem."

Lee Bennett Hopkins is a distinguished poet and anthologist. Recent collections include Oh No! Where Are My Pants and Other Disasters (Harper-Collins, 2004).