Yearly Archives: 2012

T&W is pleased to offer FREE poetry workshops for children and teens this summer!

With generous support from The Lily Auchincloss Foundation and The Lotos Foundation, T&W is partnering with the Brooklyn Public Library, the New York Public Library, and the Queens Library to offer poetry workshops based on our 2008 A Poem as Big as New York City project.

Through this initiative, thousands of young people in NYC schools and community centers took part in workshops in which they wrote poems about their experiences growing up in New York, imagining the city as its own poem character. The poems created were adapted into a single narrative by T&W writer Melanie Maria Goodreaux, A Poem as Big as New York City, which Universe Publishing (an imprint of Rizzoli) will publish as a hard-cover, illustrated children’s book in fall 2012. 

Our FREE one-hour poetry workshops will be held in select library branches on the following dates and times.  Come pay poetic tribute to our beloved city!

In early 2013, T&W will prepare an anthology of poetry created during the branch-based workshops for publication in April 2013—National Poetry Month. We hope to provide copies of the anthology to all program participants, with several copies for each host library branch.

STAY TUNED FOR MORE FREE LIBRARY WORKSHOPS IN THE FALL!

Dearest students,

On this, the celebration of the publication of the anthology of your writing, I’d like to take a moment—before this descends into the cheeto-snorting, chair-throwing, chaos-fest it inevitably will—to make a toast. If you could all raise your wee plastic cups of the Jolt Cola and Red Bull that your parents thought appropriate to send along with you for this 8:30AM party, let us acknowledge that which has brought this magnificent piece of work into being:

To your school administrators: who, despite more and more urgent messages on their voice mails; notes to their secretaries; desperate emails in the middle of the night; text messages; letters delivered by US Mail, FedEx, UPS, and courier; faxes, telexes, and one telegram; failed to respond to even the most basic questions of class room assignment, scheduling, teacher absence, or even of the plans of this very event. Your hands-off approach instilled in me exactly the confidence necessary to come into your school ready and able to meet the specific needs of your students. Bravo!

To your assistant principal: who, despite the above attempts at communication, was shocked to find me in one of your classrooms on my assigned day, and who, after my lovely conversation with the three burly security guards she called—and you should feel safe knowing such strong and conscientious men, with such pliable, firm, yet often gentle hands, are looking after your protection—asked that I immediately provide her with full lesson plans following EATM, COSEE, and NYSBOE guidelines, for each residency day. Huzzah! (more...)

Join Teachers & Writers Collaborative TONIGHT from 5-7PM for a poetry event celebrating the imaginations of New York City’s young writers!

Poets Melanie Maria Goodreaux and Liza Jessie Peterson will read from A Poem as Big as New York City, a children’s book featuring work written by young people from across the city. Afterwards they will conduct writing workshops for teens and tweens to create their own poetic tributes to the city they love.

Brooklyn Public Library's
Central Library
Trustees' Room Upper Level
10 Grand Army Plaza

June 19, 5-7PM

Rizzoli will publish A Poem as Big as New York City in Fall 2012. Special thanks to the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc. for its support of Teachers & Writers Collaborative’s partnership with the Brooklyn Public Library.

School’s out for summer, but for those students who love to put pen to paper, or who are, perhaps, just discovering the thrill of finding their own voices, the summer doesn’t have to mean a break from writing. The long, lazy days ahead offer countless opportunities to dive into writing in a way that is not always possible during the school year. In the summer issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine, just out, we’ve asked teaching artists from Teachers & Writers Collaborative and from other writers-in-the-schools programs around the country for their best summer writing prompts, and have put their creative, fun, interesting, and off-beat ideas together here to help inspire budding writers from kindergarten through high school. Happy writing!

Elementary School

Harriet Riley
Write a letter. Write to your grandmother in Guatemala or to your favorite football player or your favorite singer. Tell them about what you are doing this summer and what your interests are. If you are writing to someone you don’t know,  tell them why you admire them. Then be sure to get an envelope and stamp from your parents,  and address and mail the letter. The best part is you might just get a letter back from someone.

Explore alliteration by making a list of words that all start with the same letter. Just choose a letter and create a word avalanche—use nouns,  adjectives,  verbs,  adverbs,  anything. Just list all you can think of. Then order the words into a poem. Think shape and line breaks,  think meaning or be as silly as you can. Have fun with it!

Maya Pindyck
If you find yourself at a beach,  a lake,  a river,  or a stream,  look for five stones on the shore that you consider to be special or beautiful in some way. Sit down with those stones—either right where you are or back home—and study each one very closely. Come up with a different metaphor for each stone. Then write an “Ode to the Stone” that explores one or more of the metaphors you came up with.

Anthony Calypso
Ask an adult in your family for a photo that was taken before you were born. Do not ask any details about the picture. Instead,  take the picture and create a very short story based on the details you see in it. When you are finished,  return the photo to the adult and show what you wrote about it. (more...)

Eighteen students sit around a polished wooden table. I take in the varsity jackets hanging on the backs of chairs, the excellent orthodonture, and the cleverly modified uniforms (collars on the collared shirts so slim that they look like ribbons). Outside the window lies manicured shrubbery and well-tended stone walls. Beyond these, are the impressive estates with service entrances that I drove past on the way in.

I ask students to share from their image journals. Hands shoot up.

Prior to my arrival for my two-day writer’s residency at this tony Connecticut prep school, I had given the image journal assignment to the classroom teacher to share with the students.

My mandate is to help 8^th-graders deepen their short stories. I wanted to hit the ground running—with material from our lives that we could use to deepen our fiction. (more...)

In fall 2012, T&W will launch a searchable Digital Resource Center (DRC) on our website. Initially drawing on material from T&W's 45 years of print publications, the DRC will also include resources provided by other members of the WITS Alliance--a professional network of literary arts education programs and individuals who serve K-12 students and provide professional development for their teachers.

Help us shape this new resource by completing our short survey here. Thank you!

Voice Choice
by Caron Levis

Take 1: HOLLA TO MY PEEPS! O.M.G!!! I am, like, so totally PSYCHED to be posting MY FIRST BLOG EVER!
No, that’s not me.

Take 2: Greetings, readers, I am honored to have been invited to partake in this online adventure of Teachers & Writers Collaborative and am pleased to present to you my inaugural posting—
Oh, definitely not.

Take 3: Hello my dears, goodness, now isn’t this exciting? My very own, how do you call it? Oh yes, Blog Post. Blog. What an adorable word, what will they think of next? Oh, for goodness sakes, I hope I’m doing this right. I mean who would’ve thought? Me, blogging?
Yeah, I don’t think so.

Argh. So what, then, is my blog voice? What is Voice anyway?

I had to ask myself this question when I was hired to teach “voice” to seventh-graders. Somewhere I read that it is “the essence of the self.” What’s essence? What’s self? Wonderful questions, but I had forty minutes, and I wasn’t expected to philosophize, I was expected to get kids writing. People speak of the “elusive voice” as if it is some intangible, magical element of writing. Now, I enjoy intangibles and magic, but I needed something I could write on a chalkboard. I got out my dictionary, I Googled, I read works of authors with “strong voices,” found notes from grad school and acting class, searched my own experience, and in the end I had to teach voice the only way I knew how. I decided that for me, voice is HOW who tells what. (more...)

T&W is accepting applications until July 2 for writers to teach during the 2012-2013 school year.  Our roster of teaching artists includes writers whose work has been published, staged, or filmed; and who have experience teaching in K–12 schools and/or youth-serving community organizations. Preference is given to individuals who have taught in New York City or other large urban school districts.  People who can teach in Spanish are especially encouraged to apply.

Writers who teach for T&W do so as independent contractors. We will acknowledge your application within one week of receiving it; we plan to conduct interviews beginning in late July.

To view our application, please go here.

It’s not as hard as it seems.  For who is more adept at the art of persuasion than poets and revolutionaries?  When I think of who convinced me to drop my fears and limitations, my boundaries, to pick up my anger or to set it down again, to love or to know when to cut love off, to stand for life even when it meant injury, I think of the poetic revolutionaries: Alice Walker, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Audre Lorde, Sojourner Truth, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur.

For one of my first lessons for a persuasive writing residency at a high school, I shared SojournerTruth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech given during the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.  A debate was raging about whether women “deserved” the right to vote.  After a male critic stated women were too physically, thus mentally, weak to vote, Sojourner stepped to the podium and spoke: “The man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or give me any best place! And aint’ I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?” (more...)