Monthly Archives: February 2013

Join us at the 2013 AWP Conference in Boston, March 6-9. Here is a list of the Writers in the Schools (WITS) Alliance events this year.

WITS Alliance Schedule of Events
AWP 2013: Boston
Hynes Convention Center

All events take place in the Hynes Convention Center unless otherwise noted.

WITS Alliance Booth: #210

Wednesday, March 6

WITS Day of Service hosted by WriteBoston
12-4

WITS Alliance Membership Meeting
Room 209, Level 2
4:30-5:45

Thursday, March 7

WITS Writers on Teaching: A Reading
Lacy M. Johnson, Giuseppe Taurino, Miah Arnold, Stacy Parker Le Melle, Nicole Zaza
Related Panel
Room 102, Plaza Level
10:30-11:45

This reading by new, veteran, and former WITS teachers will explore what it really means to be agents of the WITS mission—to engage children in the power of the written word, to nurture imaginations, and to awaken young minds to the adventures of language. Readers will discuss how WITS teaching can sometimes be at least as revolutionary for teachers as for their students, even having potentially life-altering effects on teaching, writing, and overall worldview.

A Reading from Writers in the Schools [WITS Alliance]
Alise Alousi, Bao-Long Chu, Michael Dickman, Tim Seibles
Room 201, Level 2
1:30-2:45

Four poets will share work by young students as well as their own work. They will discuss the ways in which their work with school children has affected their own writing. Two of the poets will have participated in the AWP WITS Day of Service and will tell about that. Students from the Day of Service project will be invited to the event.

Rowing Your Boat across the Curriculum [WITS Alliance] 
Amy Swauger, Sarah Dohrmann, Margaret Dougherty-Goodburn, Mary Rechner, Terry Ann Thaxton
Room 102, Plaza Level
4:30-5:45
 
From lyrics on the nesting habits of eagles to odes to the ozone layer, teachers are incorporating creative writing projects in science, math, and social studies curricula. From kindergarten to college, instructors are being asked to merge the disciplines. In this session, panelists will share strategies to engage students in creative writing across the curriculum.

WITS Alliance Reception
Room 303
7:00-8:15

Friday, March 8

Founder’s Toolkit: How to Start a Non- Profit in Your Own Backyard [WITS Alliance] 
Long Chu, Allen Gee, Janet Hurley, Lisa Murphy-Lamb, Jerome Vielman
Room 102, Plaza Level
10:30-11:45

If every organization is the lengthened shadow of one person, and if the MFA is the new MBA, then poets and novelists are already equipped with the imaginative drive and divergent thinking necessary to start and operate a successful nonprofit. This panel of founding directors and arts administrators will provide useful information on how to start a literary non-profit. We will guide participants through the process of incorporating one’s passion into a viable project working for public good.

Phillip Lopate Book Signing
WITS Alliance Booth #210
1:30-2:30

Fundraising with Individuals – Crafting the Story [WITS Alliance]
Jack McBride, Kate Brennan, Lee Briccetti, Michele Kotler
Room 102, Plaza Level
3:00-4:15

Non-profits start brainstorm sessions with this phrase: if money were no object. But, money is an object, and not having it is an obstacle. In an economy where revenues and contributions are down, non-profits rely on individual donors. While 70% of all giving comes from individuals, just 5% of donations go to the arts. How do we shape a passion for our work into a message that encourages increased giving? This panel explores ways we craft our stories to win the hearts of individual donors.

Saturday, March 9

Writing to Change the World: Social Justice and Youth Writing Programs [WITS Alliance]
Janet Hurley, Tamiko Ambrose Murray, Glenis Redmond, Christina Shea, Terry Blackhawk
Room 208, Level 2
12:00-1:15

Does the endeavor of creative writing intrinsically encourage the subject of social justice and/or nurture the same? Panelists who work with students, elementary through college age, will discuss the art of teaching youth. They will chronicle the ways in which creative writing often triggers or gives space for idealism in students and empowers a sense of agency. What are the teachable moments and what risks are involved?
 
Where in the World is the Writer in Residence? [WITS Alliance]
Cecily Sailer, Alise Alousi, Tina Angelo, Josephine Jones
Room 102, Plaza Level
3:00-4:15

Although people might agree poets make the world a better place, poetry is often marginalized to classrooms. What happens when we move the poet from the ivory tower into the real world? What if a poet-in-residence could work in the hospital, museum, theater, or science lab? This panel explores how individuals and arts organizations can enliven and deepen the teaching of creative writing through unlikely collaborations. 
  
The WITS Alliance
because writing is revolutionary
witsalliance.org

As Black History Month eases into its final week, why not use a lesson from the T&W book Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African American Literature to inspire students to write imaginatively?  Among the authors discussed are James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Countee Cullen, Rita Dove, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer.

"The extraordinary difficulty of childhood, as I recall it, is making sense of an often contradictory and unpredictable world handed down by adults. Adults offer children maxims meant to buffer and protect, but sometimes these maxims do not help, leaving children with nowhere to vent their frustrations, voice their fears, or solicit other help to decipher an incongruent world. This condition of the child in some ways seems to parallel the experience of African people in the diaspora: that a people taught one set of rules that often does not apply to them, or are made to pledge allegiance to a country that has repeatedly discriminated and alienated them. Because of this there are chants and charms, mantras and prayers to help others regain their balance and move forward. African American poetry disproves the notion that words can't hurt us. While some words hurt and maim and disfigure, other words heal, nourish the soul, salve the will, and strengthen the determination."

-An excerpt from T&W book Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African American Literature, edited by Lorenzo Thomas

For other resources and lessons to motivate student writing, use our Digital Resource Center to search T&W's archives of magazines and lesson plans.

T&W writers' in-class writing prompts and exercises inspired and generated the adapted poem found in A POEM AS BIG AS NEW YORK CITY.  From this imaginative, diverse, massive, and multi-faceted material, an adapted work emerged.  Here's a peek at one of the lessons that served as the raw clay to shape young writers' minds.  All lessons were taught in New York City classrooms, but could be adapted to suit your own community and place.

Using Reflections of NYC Arts Movements, expose your classroom to poets writing about NYC so young writers can read how other New Yorkers have envisioned their city.  A great place to start is Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem."

And be sure to check out our POEM AS BIG AS NYC: LESSONS page for more great ideas!

Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.

Who can understand the clotted language of everyday American commerce: the memo, the corporation report, the business letter, the notice from the bank explaining its latest "simplified" statement? What member of an insurance or medical plan can decipher the brochure explaining his costs and benefits? What father or mother can put together a child's toy from the instructions on the box? Our national tendency is to inflate and thereby sound important. The airline pilot who announces that he is presently anticipating experiencing considerable precipitation wouldn't think of saying it may rain. The sentence is too simple—there must be something wrong with it.

But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.

-An excerpt from William Zinsser's On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Melanie Maria Goodreaux is a playwright, poet, and native of New Orleans who has made her home in New York City since 1999. Her poetry and plays—including Saydee and Deelores, Walter. Bullets. And Binoculars, amd Ka-trina Who?!—have been performed at Yale University, the Lillian Theater in Los Angeles, the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and the Chelsea Playhouse in New York City, and at the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta. She is a teaching artist with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Creative Theatrics, and the Manhattan New Music Project, teaching creative writing and drama in all the boroughs of New York City. This interview from the Digital Resource Center on T&W's Website includes a lesson idea for the classroom using poetry from Tish Benson's book Wild Like That: Good Stuff Smelling Strong.

In celebration of Black History Month, how about teaching poetry using some of the Jazz greats?  From the Bechtel-winning article "A Slip Into The Breaks: Teaching Jazz Poetry", available in our Digital Resource Center, Emily Raboteau talks about a lot of great ways that Jazz can inspire poetry and creative writing in the classroom. 

In a letter to Billie Holiday, one young writer writes: "Dear Billie, wilted flower, we want to save you, but not from the needle scratching your voice."

Another young writer listens to Holiday's "My Melancholy Baby" and is inspired to write this poem:

The Deli

just juice
        alto sax says to piano
piano keeps flipping
        eggs
        bacon
        juice
this morning I unscrambled scrambled eggs
alto says

“It is the job of writers to perceive and explain the truth. To get to the essence of things in this society is a monumental task of awareness.” – V. H. Cruz

Victor Hernández Cruz, born February 6, 1949 in Puerto Rico, grew up and went to school in Spanish Harlem New York. Cruz started writing at fifteen and his first chapbook, Papo Got His Gun! (Calle Once, 1966) was published when he was seventeen. His first collection, Snaps (Random House, 1969), was published three years later at the age of twenty. Cruz is known for blending English and Spanish into his spoken and written poetry (read about the Nuyorican Movement), and for writing about New York as a Puerto Rican. He writes as though he is a perpetual traveler, someone who has visited just long enough to feel at home in New York, California, Puerto Rico, Morocco, and Colorado.

When Urayoán Noel asked in an interview [published in the article “The Music That Is Yourself,” (T&W 38:2, 2007] about the effects of growing up with two languages, Cruz said, “It’s a limbo that I’ve learned to cultivate. I tell you, what’s more important is what I want to say. The question is, can I say it with more strength in English or in Spanish? I feel the subject itself, the content, will call forth the language it needs; the language chooses itself. …In my poetry I am also a student of history and, as I travel, I travel with that in mind. For me, traveling is just as important as investigation or reading texts because it’s seeing cultura viva (living culture)…You can see it in the kinds of food you eat, and in music influenced by this guitar or that melody.”  

In an interview with turnrow (2002), Cruz talked about how he became involved with Teachers & Writers Collaborative. “I met people [in 1968] who were important to me—Herbert Kohl, who I actually met in New York—he is an educator. … I met Ishmael Reed, the African-American novelist, who encouraged me and wrote about my early work. In California I was able to see New York from a distance, from a bird’s eye view. I usually write about places after I've left them.” In the interview with Urayoán Noel, Cruz elaborated on this:

(more...)

Using the love kids have for comics can be a great way to get kids writing and using their imagination.  The website for The Comic Book Project says, "The Comic Book Project engages children in a creative process leading to literacy reinforcement, social awareness, and character development, then publishes and distributes their work for other children in the community to use as learning and motivational tools."

If you're interested in using creative comics in your classroom, see the article in our Digital Resource Center titled "Launching a Comic Book Club" that Michael Bitz (Executive Director for The Comic Book Project) wrote for Teachers & Writers Magazine.