David Hassler is the program and outreach director for the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University; he conducts writing workshops throughout northeast Ohio. He is the author of two books of poems, most recently Red Kimono, Yellow Barn, for which he was named the 2006 Ohio Poet of the Year. He is the coeditor of A Place to Grow: Voices and Images of Urban Gardeners and, with photographer Gary Harwood, the author of Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community. After the Bell is the prose companion to Anderson and Hassler’s poetry anthology Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School (Iowa, 1999).