The Sealey Challenge: An Expansive Way of Reading Poetry

It was a Wednesday afternoon when I saw a notification pop up on my Instagram, that someone had mentioned me in their story: my chapbook had been tagged in someone’s story as “Day 21 of #TheSealeyChallenge.” I was over the moon; while I’ve read about and participated in the Sealey Challenge for the past two years, I had never considered that my little chap might become a part of it.

The Sealey Challenge is a call to action, to any one who’d like to participate: read 31 poetry books or chapbooks of your choice in 31 days. There is no prize waiting at the end; instead, participants are left with the knowledge of 31 fresh voices, a sense of belonging to a discovered community, and—hopefully—a newfound (or renewed) love of poetry.

The renowned poet and educator Nicole Sealey started the Challenge in 2017. “Seven months into my tenure as executive director at Cave Canem, I realized that I hadn’t been reading as much as I would’ve liked,” Sealey reflects. “On a whim, I put out a call across social media asking folks to join me in reading a chap or book of poems per day for the month of August.” Now in its third year, Sealey loves how the Challenge has transformed into something bigger: “a movement of poetry lovers reading a book a day and sharing their reads with the cyber world.” In an age of binge-watching and scrolling, the choice to spend one’s time engaging with a book per day has become increasingly rare—making such a movement more unique than ever.

Three years later, Sealey says that “the growth of the Sealey Challenge is most surprising, as it is now a tradition for a great many poetry lovers.” It’s true: in a quick Twitter and Instagram search for #thesealeychallenge, one will find thousands of people posting their most recent reads and encouraging each other to keep going. The encouragement doesn’t stop there. Sealey reports that this year, the poet Sara Afshar created a Facebook group for the challenge—“Though I am thrilled and grateful that she did, I didn’t ask Sara to create the group. Sara and I don’t know each other, but we’re Challenge comrades. That’s what the Challenge does: it gets likeminded folks in the same virtual room.”

The online posts, which include a range of poets such as Mahogany L. Browne and Charif Shanahan, not only provide a sense of community, but also hold participants accountable in maintaining their month-long stride. My friend Maddie just broke her leg—but before she went into surgery, she posted a pre-op photo of her Sealey Challenge book for the day. Participants are committed to seeing this challenge through and supporting each other—and Sealey is committed to engaging with her readers via replies and comments on the books being shared. One participant in the Facebook group posted: “I don’t think I ever read poetry this diligently… ever. What a gift… even if you weren’t able to read every day, it’s such [a]…precious thing for a group of people to decide to make a simultaneous commitment to themselves and [to] art.”

After seeing my own chap posted by a participant, I started to scroll through other books that person had read. Their month had been packed with everything from full-length collections to chapbooks, the likes of Catherine Barnett, Anne Carson, Jericho Brown, Saretta Morgan. I couldn’t help but realize how rare it was to find someone reading chapbooks alongside National Book Award winners. When else might a reader hold such a vast range of poetry in their head at the same time?

These are poets focused on gender, nature, joy, violence, all being read one after the other; an improvised syllabus promoting new associations between poets, encouraging readers to draw connections between books and poets that they might otherwise have read years apart. Now, Anne Carson’s FLOAT can sit beside a lesser-known chapbook in someone’s mind, as part of the same hive. Furthermore, poetry is the only literary form that can accommodate such a rapid rate of reading; being able to jump seamlessly between voices like this can expand the way we think about the world.

In this way, the Sealey Challenge has become a new type of MFA program: required reading, group discussion, a sense of community, accountability, and a diversity of themes. “The Sealey Challenge has inspired offshoots: Sealey September, for those unable to participate in August, and #SeptWomenPoets, which encourages folks to read chap/books by women all month long,” notes Sealey. In its grassroots growth, the Challenge has built out a new canon of poets, which has flourished with the optimism of Sealey and her fellow readers. It is this kind of positivity that gives people time and energy to read new books, form bonds, and challenge themselves.

“I hope the Sealey Challenge lives on beyond us, beyond me. Beyond Sara Afshar. Beyond poet Dante Micheaux, who actually named the challenge back in 2017. During the challenge, we read new and old books, we read books we’ve been putting off and reread books we love,” says Sealey.