It’s Summer: Time to Write

Many of the Writers in the Schools (WITS)  programs offer summer writing workshops for kids. These programs offer kids a chance to fall in love with reading and writing. To learn more, click on the city that’s nearest you:

Austin

Asheville, NC

Boise and other Idaho locations

Dallas

Houston

Indianapolis

Missoula

San Antonio

Houston Hosts its 25th Anniversary Reading on May 3

The 2009 Young Writers Reading on Sunday, May 3, 2009 will take place at Discovery Green, on the main stage, in downtown Houston. Celebrating the 25th anniversary of WITS Houston, this reading promises to be the biggest and best one yet. Come see why WITS has been named the premier literary arts organizations in Texas.

Over year long workshops, WITS students embark on a voyage of personal expression and a search for their voice. The audience will be treated to an uplifting afternoon filled with the discovery and intrigue of language and will experience the evidence of each child’s personal achievements in their artistic journey. Students from elementary to high school will come together to read their strongest work from the school year. Come and see the pride and confidence on the faces of the children that read their work to an enthusiastic audience of parents, teachers, and peers.

Badgerdog at Round Top

On Friday, April 17, as part of National Poetry Month, Badgerdog will once again partner with the Poetry at Round Top Festival. Students from Ojeda Junior High, Del Valle Junior High, Del Valle Opportunity Center and Del Valle High School will spend the day at the International Festival Institute at Round Top, where they will take part in poetry writing and performance workshops with award-winning authors Jeff Stumpo and Jenny Browne. Badgerdog instructors, along with English teachers from all four schools, will participate in a morning workshop with renowned poet and University of Texas professor Dean Young.

Founded in 1971, the International Festival Institute hosts exceptional year-round education and performance programs. This is the second year Badgerdog has partnered with the Poetry at Round Top Festival.  To read more about the International Festival Institute, please click here.  To sign up for the Poetry Festival click here.

Happy Poetry Month from The WITS Alliance

Most members of the WITS Alliance are celebrating National Poetry Month in exciting ways. Please explore their websites using the blogroll to the right.

The Art of Translation: Austin Students Delve into Language

On Friday, April 3, Badgerdog students in Austin participated in UWC After Hours’ Community Convergence: Bridging. Connecting. Translating.

Sponsored by the University of Texas’ Undergraduate Writing Center and Department of Rhetoric and Writing, this open house event showcased the pagecast projects of Badgerdog student writers who had previously participated in media translation workshops at the UWC.

Since the summer of 2008 Bagerdog has partnered with the UT Undergraduate Writing Center for a series of three-hour workshops to help students to foster creative and critical engagement with digital media and to become accustomed to seeing themselves as learners in a university setting.   To goal of this project is to introduce high school creative writing students to effective and analytic use of technology by exploring different avenues for publishing their work. These workshops capitalize on the motivation of Badgerdog students to translate their original creative writing into multimedia productions of images, music, and their own voice recordings.

This translation project not only offers students an opportunity to create digital media and thus personally engage with technological production, but it offers a more visceral connection to the rhetorical and writing strategies necessary for a successful translation, such as concepts of audience, tone, and voice.  Through this approach, we hope to encourage students to become critically engaged in the process of producing media as well as giving them an opportunity to join their own voice to the digital world.

To view previous Podcasts created by high school students in the Badgerdog program, click here.

Teachers & Writers Collaborative Celebrates National Poetry Month with the New York Transit Museum

Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) and the New York Transit Museum will celebrate National Poetry Month with a public reading and writing event to be held at Museum on Sunday, April 26, at 2 PM. The event will feature a reading by award-winning poet Vijay Seshadri and students from the Magnet School for Science and Technology (K154) in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The event will also include a writing activity led by T&W writer Matthew Burgess, an experienced T&W teaching artist.

The celebration at the Transit Museum will mark National Poetry Month and is also part of T&W’s citywide poetry project, A Poem as Big as the City. Launched in 2008, A Poem as Big as the City is a special project for which thousands of young people across the city are working with T&W writers to write poems about their experiences growing up in New York City. As part of A Poem as Big as the City, T&W will publish selected youth poetry in a book to be nationally distributed and will feature selected youth poets in public readings with well-known New York writers.

The event at the New York Transit Museum during National Poetry Month will be the first of these readings. The event will showcase the literary talents of young Brooklynites attending PS 154K and will feature poet Vijay Seshadri, who has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His poetry collections include Wild Kingdom and James Laughlin Award winner The Long Meadow, and his writing has appeared in The American Scholar, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. Seshadri currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives with his family in Brooklyn.

ArtsEdge Residencies for Artists and Writers

Applications are now being accepted for ArtsEdge Residencies at The University of Pennsylvania.  These residencies are provided through a collaboration of the Kelly Writers House, the Fine Arts Department of the School of Design, and Penn’s Facilities & Real Estate Services (FRES).

The ArtsEdge Residency project is designed to encourage and support the careers of emerging artists and writers. Through ArtsEdge Residencies, we offer two one-year residencies in a live/work space near Penn’s campus. ArtsEdge aims to support the creative work of young artists and writers, and create a live/work environment that will inspire interdisciplinary exploration. Residencies last for one year and include a dedicated studio for each writer/artist, living space, and close affiliation with the writing and artistic communities at Penn.

During the course of their residencies, writers and artists will develop at least one collaborative project with the Writers House or Fine Arts Department. Qualified applicants may also be considered to teach one course at Penn in the spring semester. Two residencies are available, one for a visual artist and one for a writer. The residences are not intended for current undergraduates. No affiliation with Penn is necessary.

TERMS: Each residency includes a one-bedroom apartment with an additional studio space. Subsidized monthly rent on each one-bedroom apartment (for which residents are responsible) is $400. Rent includes all utilities (except phone) and wireless Internet. The Writers House, the Fine Arts Department, and FRES will subsidize remaining rent.

MOVE-IN DATE: September 1, 2009

TO APPLY: Send letter of interest, CV, bio or artist statement, and portfolio (minimum: 10 pages of written work or 20 images). Word documents, PDFs, PPTs, CDs, and DVDs are all acceptable. Please include personal contact information and the names and contact information of at least two professional references. If you would like to be considered for a course, please also submit a brief description of your teaching experience or qualifications. Submit application electronically to or by mail (or hand-delivery) to: ArtsEdge Residency c/o Kelly Writers House 3805 Locust Walk Philadelphia, PA 19104

APPLICATION DEADLINE: April 15, 2009

Opportunities for Writers from Teachers & Writers Collaborative

Teachers & Writers Collaborative has recently announced two new fellowships for writers, the T & W Fellowships and the Ellen Levine Fund fellowship.

1) Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) announces the 2009–2010 T&W Fellowships, awarded to support early-career development for two emerging writers. The 2009–2010 Fellowships are made possible by the generous support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, following initial support from the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund in the New York Community Trust.

ELIGIBILITY

Applicants for T&W Fellowships must:

• Be age 35 or younger at the beginning of the Fellowship period
• Live in New York City or be able to plan an extended stay in the area (T&W cannot assist with finding housing for individuals who do not currently live in New York.)
• Show exceptional artistic promise and a commitment to a writing career
• Demonstrate financial need

THE FELLOWSHIP

The 2009–2010 T&W Fellowship period is September 14, 2009, to June 18, 2010. During that time, T&W Fellows will receive:

• A $20,000 stipend and the opportunity to apply for an additional small stipend to support research or travel
• Office space and resources (e.g., computer, supplies) at T&W
• Opportunities to meet with experienced professionals from publishing, literary arts, theater, or other fields related to the Fellow’s work
• Exposure to all aspects of T&W’s work, including writing residencies, publications, and the 2020 Visions reading series

As part of their fellowships, the 2008–2009 T&W Fellows are participating in a pilot two-week residency program at the Pocantico Conference Center of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The opportunity to spend time at Pocantico may be made available to the 2009–2010 Fellows.  Visit the Teachers & Writers site for complete guidelines.

2) Later this year, the New York Community Trust will make the second annual award of at least $7,500 to a writer working on a second or third book of fiction or creative, literary nonfiction, who doesn’t yet have a publishing contract for the work. This award is supported by the Ellen Levine Fund for Writers.

Teachers & Writers Collaborative will again serve as a nominator for the award this year. The 2008 award went to a writer whose work T&W submitted: Gabriel Brownstein for his novel in progress titled I Was Here but I Disappeared.

Submissions to be considered for nomination by T&W should include contact information for the author (mailing address, e-mail address, and phone number(s)), an outline of the book, and 50-75 pages of the manuscript. Submissions should be mailed or hand-delivered to:

Amy Swauger
Teachers & Writers Collaborative
520 Eighth Ave., Ste. 2020
New York, NY 10018

Submissions will not be accepted via e-mail or fax.

The deadline for submitting work to T&W is 5:00 PM (Eastern), Friday, May 15, 2009. T&W will review submissions and select one or two as nominees for the award. The winner of the 2009 award will be notified by the New York Community Trust in late summer/early fall.

Please send questions regarding the 2009 award to aswauger at twc.org, or call 212-691-6590.

Poetry at Round Top

Poetry at Round Top (Texas) will host its 8th Annual Festival Weekend on April 17, 18 & 19, 2009.

Here is a description from the festival website:

The Festival Hill campus by the village of Round Top is a miracle that has been growing amid green rolling Texas hills for the last four decades. Part pastoral retreat of extraordinary serenity, part world-class fine arts center for study and performance, and part Middle Earth — here, over one weekend in spring for the past seven years, a unique poetry festival has gathered readers, writers and friends in a close community of sharing and discovery. Leading American writers including Li-Young Lee and Carolyn Forché, Tony Hoagland and Marie Howe, along with many others, have participated and come away singing the praises of the festival. This year, Poetry at Round Top is exceptionally proud to announce that W.S. Merwin will be our honored guest poet. For the second year, Round Top FRiDAY will offer a program designed for select secondary school students and teachers, featuring readings, student workshops and teacher training. This collaboration between Austin Community College, Badgerdog Literary Publishing and Poetry at Round Top offers a unique study experience for participants.

For more information about the poetry festival, click here.

Bechtel Prize for Essays on Teaching Writing

Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) awards the Bechtel Prize annually in recognition of an exemplary essay addressing important issues in the areas of creative writing education, literary studies, and/or the profession of writing. The deadline to receive submissions for the 2009 Bechtel Prize is 5:00 PM (Eastern), Tuesday, June 30, 2009.

In 2009, T&W is seeking Bechtel Prize submissions that explore the teaching of creative writing in combination with another artistic discipline, such as dance, media arts, music, theater, or the visual arts; or with another academic discipline, such as math or history. We are seeking essays that shed light on the nature of the creative process and want to read your stories about viewing the art of writing through a different lens, and your take on the benefits and challenges of such cross-disciplinary work.

Questions that might be addressed in essays include, but are not limited to, the following:

What are the benefits of an interdisciplinary approach to teaching creative writing?

Are there aspects of the creative processes central to the literary arts that students can understand more clearly in the context of other disciplines?

What are the complications of teaching creative writing with another discipline?

Do writers who teach in an interdisciplinary way find that work influencing their own creative processes?

The winning essay appears in Teachers & Writers magazine, and the author receives a $1,500 honorarium. Authors of submissions selected as finalists for the award share honoraria of $500, and their essays may also be published in Teachers & Writers. The previous winners of the Bechtel Prize can be found here.

Prospective entrants for the Bechtel Prize are encouraged to review a sample issue ofTeachers & Writers to familiarize themselves with the magazine’s style. To order a sample issue of the magazine for $5.00, click here.

Complete guidelines are available on the Teachers & Writers site. Questions regarding the Bechtel Prize should be directed to <bechtel(at)twc.org> (replace (at) with @).

[cross-posted on the WITS blog]

The WITS Alliance at AWP 2009 in Chicago: A Report

The WITS Alliance events at AWP:

WITS Alliance Members Meeting with Robin Reagler

 My Voice, Wide as the Sun: Preparing to Teach Creative Writing in K-12 Classrooms. (Robin Reagler, Ellen Hagan, Beth Divis, Darel Holnes, Avery Young, Rebecca Hoogs, Jack McBride) How do writers prepare to work with under served youth? Five organizations will share how they train MFA students, graduates of MFA programs, and professional writers to enter the K-12 classroom. As MFA graduates and professional writers look to share their love of writing and earn a living, Writers in the Schools work is an important opportunity. The panel will discuss different internships and training seminars for writers to transform their teaching methods to meet the needs of younger writers.

From The Ground Up, Developing A Writers In The Schools Program At Your College. (Allen Gee, David Hassler, Derrick Medina, John Teschner ) On this panel sponsored by the WITS Alliance, faculty and students from Georgia College and Kent State will discuss the pragmatic aspects of developing a Writers in the Schools program. The panel will talk about developing relationships with public schools, finding funding sources, incorporating service learning components, preparing college students as teachers, planning typical program calendars and events, and the many rewards of community outreach for faculty and students.

WITS Alliance Reception with Terry Blackhawk and John Oliver Simon

Building Online Literary Communities: An Overview and Case Studies. (Emily Warn, Robin Reagler, Loyal Miles, Giuseppe Taurino) Emerging online technologies, loosely called Web 2.0, provide exciting new avenues to form literary communities and promote literary culture. For writing educators, technology choices—blogs, podcasts, distance learning, forums, YouTube, and Yahoo and Google groups—can sometimes feel overwhelming. This panel presents an overview of technological options as well as tips on where to start. Panelists will then present case studies from three WITSA programs that have used technology to better serve their students, their instructors, and their broader communities.

A Room of One’s Own: Student Writing Centers. (Amy Swauger, Renee Angle, Sherina Sharpe) Sponsored by the WITS Alliance, this session examines efforts to provide a writing community for students. Picture a young writer in a space where an older author is available to talk conversationally about the student’s work, to discuss the work seriously, critically, with both generosity and honesty. Whether based in a school or on a college campus, writing centers provide a place for students who want to write or to know more about writing to be welcomed and understood.

Writing Helps Kids…But Can You Prove It? (Melanie Moore, Kirk Lynn, Rebecca Hoogs, Mark Creekmore, Caroline Newman) This is part of the Writers in the Schools Alliance strand of panels addressing various aspects of literary arts programming for children. New and experienced program directors, as well as the countless writers who go into schools to work with kids, will learn the good, the bad, and the ugly of proving the effectiveness of literary programs in today’s data-driven world.

Best Practices: Teaching Expressive Writing With Hospital Populations. (Austin Bunn, Long Chu, Paul Sznewajs) This panel brings together representatives from four programs that teach creative writing to hospital patients and those struggling with illness: The Patient Voice Project (Iowa Writers’ Workshop), WITS Houston, and Snow City Arts in Chicago. The aim of the panel is to study and share the practical approaches to launching these programs, the current research on writing and wellness, and the challenges and rewards of teaching hospital populations. Given the multitude of art therapy programs, our specific focus is on the “best practices” for writing projects related to program design and pedagogy. The Patient Voice Project offers free creative writing classes to the chronically ill, taught by MFA graduate students in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. WITS Houston and Snow City Arts provide creative writing classes expressly to young people, as extensions of hospital education programs.

WITS Alliance at AWP 2009 – Chicago

The WITS Alliance had a great AWP Conference again this year. Attendance at all of our events was high. Photos and a report are both forthcoming.