ABOUT FAHN
ABOUT FAHN
Matt Fahnestock is an English teacher in Carlisle, Pennsylvania who now works with gifted high school students for enrichment, acceleration, and college counseling. He holds English degrees from Dickinson College and Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English, where he concentrated on poetry and theatre. In 2008, he was selected for a National Endowment for the Arts seminar called "Say Something Wonderful: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetry," where he studied poetry and performance. He founded his school's improv comedy troupe Wingin' It! and its Poetry Out Loud recitation program in its inaugural year nationwide and has since coached many students to the state finals. He is four-time recipient of international travel grants for teachers including the NEA Foundation's Global Learning Fellows and the US State Department's Teachers for Global Classrooms program, for which he built a global education website called Fahn Voyage.
During his last few years in the English classroom, Fahn made a habit of starting each class with a poem. Whenever possible, he aligned that poem with class content, but some days he simply shared a poem he loved. To this day, he reads poetry to anyone who will listen...even if they aren't yet ready to appreciate it. He understands this because his own high school English teacher, Mr. Kevin Murray, used to recite poems he did not appreciate but once inspired eleventh-grade Fahn to memorize and perform Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," which he still recalls and to which he subjects his students each Halloween. This website was established during the Coronavirus quarantine of 2020 when Fahn wanted to continue sharing poems aloud and people everywhere could stand to listen to the music and wisdom of words.
All poems are the property of their respective owners. All content has been reproduced here for educational and informational purposes to benefit site visitors and is provided at no charge and with good intentions.
This website is intended to expose people who aren't traditional consumers of poetry to writers with whom they may not be familiar in the hopes that they'll read more extensively. To that end, with every single post I make sure to promote the purchase of the books containing every poem I read...just as I have purchased them all myself.
If legal representatives ask me to remove a poem from the site, this will be done immediately. I guarantee to fulfill such demands within 48 hours, but I do reserve the right to investigate whether the person submitting that demand is authorized to do so or not. Such demands can be directed to fahnreadspoetry@gmail.com.