On March 9, 2021, the Lake Forest Library hosted an event called “The Poems of Reading with Patrick”, featuring Benjamin Goluboff, Lake Forest College Professor of English. In a discussion format, Gobuboff read and discussed several of the poems highlighted in Reading with Patrick by Michelle Kuo, and one or two extra related poems that were not.
Poems read and disucssed in no particular order include “To Paula in Late Spring”, “Mysteries, Yes”, “My Father’s Love Letters”, “Love (III)”, and “A Light exists in Spring”. Click here to download copies of these poems to read yourself.
Watch a recording of this discussion and lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyfHbE16rO0.
About Reading with Patrick
Book summary
Michelle Kuo, at age twenty-two, arrives in the Mississippi Delta town of Helena, Arkansas in 2004. Kuo quickly realizes that her new home, the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement, is still poor, still segregated and still in need of dramatic change.
Helena is where she meets Patrick, inquisitive and quiet, with a poor attendance record. With Kuo’s attention, Patrick’s reading and writing flourish and he wins a school-wide award for “Most Improved.” When Kuo leaves Helena to pursue a law degree, she suspects herself of having taken the easier route.
Three years later, Kuo’s attention receives the news that Patrick is in prison for murder. Kuo puts her life on hold and moves back to the Delta.
In the visiting room of the Phillips County Jail, she and Patrick spend seven months poring over classic novels, poems, and narratives by Frederick Douglass, C.S. Lewis, Marilynne Robinson, James Baldwin, W.S. Merwin and more. Patrick learns how to be a serious reader and a fluent writer, and in doing so, discovers new worlds both inside and outside of himself.
In her time reading with Patrick, Kuo is herself transformed as she contends with the questions of what it is we owe each other and how starkly economic and racial inequality determine our life outcomes. What social transformation is necessary to change a life? And what kind of connection can two people make when there exists such dramatic inequality between them?
Author bio
Michelle Kuo is a writer, attorney, and professor. She is the author of Reading with Patrick, a memoir of mentoring and tutoring a former student in a rural Arkansas county jail. It was a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice, and was the 2019 Washtenaw Reads at Ann Arbor District Library. As Pulitzer-Prize winning James Forman, Jr. and Arthur Evenchik write in The Atlantic, “Impassioned writing and hard-earned wisdom set the book apart … In all of the literature addressing education, race, poverty, and criminal justice, there has been nothing quite like Reading with Patrick.”
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Michelle has worked to protect the rights of undocumented immigrants, assist asylum seekers, and defend incarcerated people. She has taught in prisons in the United States, France, and Taiwan. Michelle is interested in literacy, racial and socioeconomic equality, and abolitionist approaches towards prison and detention. She has published in The New York Review of Books, the New York Times, Public Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point and other outlets; recently, she and her husband Albert Wu started "A Broad and Ample Road," a weekly newsletter on culture and politics. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at the American University of Paris, where she works closely with college students on issues of social justice.
As Michelle puts it in the New York Times, her book is an "intimate story about the failure of the education and criminal justice systems and the legacy of slavery; about how literature is for everyone, how books connect people, and the hope that with enough openness and generosity we can do the hard work of knowing each other and ourselves."
Find a list of selected titles highlighted in Reading with Patrick at https://readbetween.org/about. Assignments and homework, works read and left unfinished, or otherwise briefly mentioned by not highlighted, are not included.
Did we miss something? Email us to let us know at reference@lakeforestlibrary.org.