Arts & Sciences Magazine

By Steve Holt

The story of how the Poet Laureate of the United States personally took a fledgling Boston public school under his wing is as unlikely as it is inspirational.

Robert Pinsky first learned about the Boston Arts Academy at a small dinner—it was either 1998 or 1999—in the Cambridge home of David Nathan, then the director of the Dana Farber Cancer Center in Boston, and his wife, Jean. Nathan had treated Pinsky’s daughter for cancer years earlier, and the two men had become friends. On this evening, Nathan talked about his daughter Linda, who had recently started an innovative public high school focused on the visual and performing arts, across Ipswich Street from Fenway Park in Boston. 

Pinsky’s interest was piqued at the idea of a school where “art is not an ornament,” but “important and essential for what it is to learn.” As US Poet Laureate, Pinsky—a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and former director of BU’s Creative Writing Program—was used to reading his and others’ work for the President and dignitaries at the White House. But it was a visit to the newly formed Boston Arts Academy (BAA) for an exhibition of student artwork based on Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno that lit a fire he would carry for decades. Pinsky was so impressed by what he saw in BAA’s students that he instructed his graduate assistant to look into sending MFA candidates to the high school as volunteer teachers. “It’s in our neighborhood,” he recalls telling the GA. “Stay in touch with these people. We’re going to staff a creative writing course there. And it’s going to be a course full of painters, singers, musicians, and visual artists.”

A quarter(ish)-century later, BU sends four MFA fellows to BAA each academic year—two poets and two fiction writers, usually—to support the school’s creative writing goals and mentor its young artists. Pinsky has also harnessed his status as one of America’s most beloved living poets to tell the story of BU’s creative writing fellowship, which he says is among his proudest accomplishments.

“Every school in this country that has an MFA program in creative writing ought to know about what we’ve been doing for these 25 years or so, and BU should be very proud to present that as a model,” Pinsky says.

A Poet in the Classroom

Just a few weeks into her MFA studies, poet Jenna Good (GRS’25) wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to high school. As part of the paid fellowship Good had accepted, she could choose to teach either undergraduate BU students or 10th graders at the Boston Arts Academy.

“My brother was like, ‘teach college, don’t teach high school,’” she says, laughing. “‘High school is crazy. The kids are too young.’”

But Good, who only started writing poetry a few years ago as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, says she ultimately picked the BAA fellowship because she decided that’s where she could have the greatest impact.

“I didn’t have any exposure to creative writing [in high school], so I thought it’d be kind of cool to have a creative writing presence in the classroom—somebody young who writes poems in a way that is sometimes not presented in school,” Good says.

For two hourlong blocks each week, Good and fiction fellow Undrea Martin (GRS’25) assist BAA language and literary arts teacher Ling-Se Chesnakas. For a lesson on allusion, Good read aloud to the students a poem she’d written that imagines if Ophelia, of Hamlet fame, lived today. In the poem, Ophelia paints calligraphy on her arms in mascara, lights incense, and plays Eminem’s Recovery in her room. 

“The kids had a really interesting reaction to it,” says Good, who earns a teaching fellowship stipend of $18,000 over the course of the academic year on top of a full scholarship. “It was really effective, and neither of us knew it would work out like that. It’s been really cool.”

These are the kinds of connections that have created a foundation of writing at a school where most students would rather be singing, painting, or acting, according to Joy Bautista, BAA’s dean of student achievement. With a tenure at BAA that goes back to 2001, Bautista has had, perhaps, the longest view of the school’s partnership with BU. She oversees the program and meets annually with Pinsky, BU Favorite Poem Project Director Annette Frost (GRS’17), and Annaka Saari (GRS’21), administrative coordinator of the BU Creative Writing program to plan for the year. (Frost and Saari, who both earned MFAs from BU and worked as BAA fellows, each oversee aspects of the partnership on the BU side.) While writing is not yet one of BAA’s four majors or minors, Bautista credits the BU partnership with helping the school build it into the foundation of the other disciplines. 

“Creative writing is entrenched in so many of the arts majors, so whether our students major in dance, visual art, music, or theater, I think you can find connections to being a creative writer,” Bautista says. “But also just that creative thinking, it allows students in a different medium to still use that creative thought, which can then be applicable either through an interdisciplinary lens with the art that they’re doing, or just stretching their brain in a creative way that they can apply to their arts.”

The benefits of the partnership go both ways, Good says. The 22-year-old would like to one day be a teacher herself—while working as a professional poet, of course—and her fellowship is providing valuable experience. The takeaways for the fellows, says Frost, “are huge, especially if those people haven’t had a lot of public school or high school [teaching] experience. I think you get spoiled if your teaching experience is always at the university level. You forget about things like classroom management, because you don’t need it in the same way you do in a high school. But any challenge as a teacher that you overcome is something that only makes you a stronger teacher for all of those future years.”

Sustaining a Partnership

BU’s presence at Boston Arts Academy has evolved and grown over its two decades. Fellows have, some years, cotaught the writing course at the high school. When the school has had a full-time literature and language arts teacher, as it does now in Chesnakas, the BU fellows provide more of a supporting role. The program has evolved in other ways as well. In its early days, it was more of a personal labor of love for Pinsky and his students, who would visit the school as volunteers. Today, it is a fully-funded fellowship, support for which Pinsky credits former BU President Aram V. Chobanian, who served from 2002–2005, and Malika Jeffries-El, associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Pinsky never misses an opportunity to use his celebrity to raise funds for BAA’s writing program or bring his fellow writers and philanthropic friends to the school.

“Robert is an enormously generous person,” says BAA founder Linda Nathan. Pinsky introduced philanthropists Nancy and Fred Levin, whose San Francisco-based Shenson Foundation supports young artists, to the creative writing work being done at BAA. Before Nancy’s death, the Levins helped fund a literary arts magazine at the school, Nathan says, supported the biannual Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Readings at BU, and even hosted Nathan and a group of young writers at their California home. “His relationships became our relationships,” she adds.

Alongside his Favorite Poem Project (launched while he was Poet Laureate), Pinsky says the longstanding BAA fellowship is among his proudest achievements. Nathan recalls that even after he’d set up the fellowship with MFA students, he turned his attention to BAA’s faculty. Pinsky facilitated salons that brought together arts and core curriculum instructors to think about new and innovative strategies to break through to students and continue working on their own projects. Those salons, Nathan says, set the stage for the interdisciplinary curriculum BAA utilizes today. 

“He’s an amazing human being,” Nathan says. “Anything he touches is going to glow. There’s nothing quite like it.”