Wednesday Night Poetry features high school English teacher
Malvern High School English teacher Sarah Burns will be the feature for Wednesday Night Poetry at Kollective Coffee+Tea, 110 Central Ave. The weekly open mic session for all poets will begin at 6:30 p.m. and Burns will perform at 7 p.m., followed by another open mic session. Admission is free and open to all ages.
A graduate of Lake Hamilton High School, Burns received her B.A. in Spanish and English from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is an alumna of the Donaghey Scholars Program and Cooper Honors Program in English. After graduation she taught English in Japan for two years with the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program while living in the Japanese countryside.
Burns’ passion is learning about other languages and cultures. She has been chased across the desert in Morocco by an angry camel and danced with strangers around a fire in the mountains of China.
When Burns returned to Arkansas she earned her master’s degree in Secondary Education at UALR and has been teaching English at Malvern High School for the last five years. She also sponsors a Japanese Club after school where she teaches students about Japanese language and culture.
She started writing poetry in the second grade when her best friend asked her to illustrate some short stories. “That’s when I realized I wasn’t very good at drawing,” Burns said in a news release. “So I started writing instead.” Her poetry is influenced by current events, her international travels and childhood memories of growing up on a chicken farm. She currently lives with a toothless and opinionated cat named Lucy.
Email budonfoot@yahoo.com for more information about Wednesday Night Poetry.