Throughout my life, reading and writing has always played a major role. I never wrote my own poetry, but throughout high school and college, it’s had a large impact on me and has encouraged me to be more eloquent in my own writings. It’s taught me to treat papers, not as assignments, but as pieces of my own self-expression. Adding my English minor was an option suggested to me from one of my professors, and I tacked it on almost as an afterthought. But this small decision has made waves in my life. I’ve met people that I wouldn’t otherwise have known, and had the opportunity to take this class and be a tiny part in this remarkable publishing endeavor.
As for what exactly my role was in the making of Why Poetry? I have to admit mine was fairly small. My job was at first to read over the book announcement and see what I thought of it, and secondary was to suggest any changes that I thought would better catch the eye and to overall make it more dynamic and engaging. This was a fairly simple task, and the announcement already looked great. I just had a few small suggestions to make it flow a little better and stick out a little more design-wise and ta-da, finished product.
I decided, to do my part of spreading the word, that I should design a bookmark. I went through several different options, but I finally decided on one after trying to tie as much together as possible.
For one, I chose this quote from Joe O’Connor because I thought that it tied together a lot with the overall book that we were working with. Why Poetry? Because you can always be accompanied by it. I also used it because it was on our book announcement, and I thought that it would be great to hearken back to what my job entailed. I used the imagery of a set of library shelves because I thought it was the most fitting. A place that contains a lot of poetry but that you can find just about anywhere, almost as if the place itself is accompanying you. I used Canva (https://www.canva.com) to achieve the design, making sure it had a darker background so that both the color of the font stood out, and so that the bookmark itself would stand out against the white pages.
Overall, I’d have to say that I sincerely enjoyed being a part of this process, no matter how small my job was, because of the amazing final product that came out of it and the creative fun along the way.
