Landscape with Playground Equipment, Pigtails, and Hypodermic Syringes, by Nicole Stellon O'Donnell

Nicole Stellon O’Donnell’s, first collection, Steam Laundry, won the 2013
Willa Award for poetry. A recipient of writers’ grants from the Rasmuson
Foundation and the Alaska Arts & Culture Foundation, and a Fulbright
Distinguished Award in Teaching, she teaches at a public school in a youth
facility in Fairbanks, Alaska.

About the work:

I am a public schoolteacher exhausted by the “Oh Captain!” archetypes built of
a fetishized vision of teaching and the simultaneous greedy-lazy-union-fatcat
characterizations of teachers pushed by educorp apologists. Teachers in America get
painted as saints or demons. Last spring, I decided to write about what it’s really like,
on a personal level, to teach in this country. Now that I’ve started, I can’t stop.