My team curated this Poetry Month edition because we wanted young learners to hear three distinct Black voices — spanning more than a century of American poetry — brought to life through professional narration and grade-banded vocabulary. Morning by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Seascape by Langston Hughes, and The Dreams of the Dreamer by Georgia Douglas Johnson each offer something different: the joy of a spring morning, the quiet wonder of the open sea, and the ache of a dreamer’s inner life. Some might wonder if this curation is for Black History Month or Women’s History Month — and these poems belong there too. But the truth is we are putting it out for National Poetry Month because great poetry does not wait for a designated month to matter. Dunbar, Hughes, and Georgia Douglas Johnson wrote work that is universal in its emotional reach and precise in its craft, and we believe children should encounter these voices in April, in September, in January — whenever a teacher or caregiver opens a page and says, listen to this.
Central to this edition is Andrea L. Patterson, the Chief Creative Officer of the This Month™ team and an Obie Award–winning, Drama Desk Award–nominated actress whose narration brings each poem off the page with warmth, precision, and genuine feeling. But Andrea’s contribution goes far beyond performance. She is a passionate curator of literature for her community, driven by a deep commitment to making high-quality, meaningful texts accessible to young readers from the earliest grades. Grounded in a Science of Reading framework, Andrea understands that fluency, phonological awareness, and vocabulary acquisition are not separate from joy — they grow together when children hear beautiful language read beautifully. Her work with This Month™ reflects that conviction at every level, from the poems she champions to the way she voices them.
Joining Andrea on this edition is singer-songwriter Taharqa Patterson, who narrates Seascape by Langston Hughes. Taharqa brings a musician’s ear to the poem’s spare, rhythmic lines — hearing in Hughes’s alternating rhyme scheme the same instinct for melody and breath that shapes a song. The result is a reading that feels both intimate and expansive, perfectly matched to the poem’s quiet seascape imagery.
The three poems in this edition were chosen not just for their literary quality but for the range of entry points they offer across grade bands. Morning gives K–1 learners concrete, sensory vocabulary — mist, dew-drops, wind — while opening up richer figurative language for Grades 4–5. Seascape, at just eight lines across two stanzas, is one of the most compact and accessible poems Hughes ever wrote, and its ABCB ballad structure makes it a natural anchor for teaching rhyme and rhythm. The Dreams of the Dreamer, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s perfectly symmetrical two-stanza lyric, introduces even the youngest readers to the idea that a poem can carry an entire emotional world in very few words — and gives older students an entry point into metaphor, parallelism, and the poetic tradition of the Harlem Renaissance.
Each poem in the This Month™ Audio E-Reader — which we simply call the “TEJ Reader” after our beloved tortoise pictured in the This Month™ logo — comes with three grade bands of vocabulary — K–1, 2–3, and 4–5 — with definitions drawn directly from the poem’s own language, CCSS-aligned standards chips, and professional narration designed to support joint media engagement between children and the caring adults in their lives. This is literature as it should be: present, alive, and within reach.
— Dr. Katherine M. Schlatter, CEO and Founder, This Month™
