T&W events take place in the Center for Imaginative Writing at Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 520 Eighth Avenue (between 36th and 37th Streets), Suite 2020, New York City. All events are free, unless otherwise indicated.
T&W and the Center for Imaginative Writing are easily accessible via West Side transportation. Please see the subway directions in the sidebar on this page. For further information, call 212-691-6590 or e-mail events.
Listen to podcasts of past events here.
MAY 2008
2020 VISIONS: DANIEL TOMASULO
May 6 – 6:30 PM
Presented by Graywolf Press
- In Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist’s Memoir, Daniel Tomasulo chronicles and confesses his childhood delusions, his particularly challenging experiences as a parent, and his life as a psychologist. His memories of being a kid—controlling streetlights, avoiding any foods with seeds lest he get pregnant, enduring his mother’s cold love—are vivid, and his life as a parent is riddled with dilemmas. To start, he finds himself locked in a rubber-walled hospital room while his wife is in labor, and later he faces the necessity of giving mouth-to-mouth to his daughter’s suffering Raggedy Ann doll. As a professional who specializes in the highly personal, he traces the unusual and illuminating connections between his own life and the evocative scenes from the lives of his patients. Tomasulo is a psychologist, psychodrama trainer, and writer on faculty at New Jersey City University.
2020 VISIONS: WRITERS FROM TEACHERS & WRITERS COLLABORATIVE AND GIRLS WRITE NOW
May 7 – 7:00 PM
- Grace Bastidas realized her calling fifteen years ago as a reporter for the school paper at Newtown High School in Queens. From there she went on to become the arts and culture editor for Fordham University’s student publication. After working as a senior editor at the Village Voice, she decided to give freelance writing a shot. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Post, New York magazine, and other publications. When she chooses to stray from her hometown, she can be found anywhere in the world feeding her wanderlust. This is her second year mentoring with Girls Write Now.
- Nicole Callihan’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared in many publications, including Painted Bride Quarterly, Forklift, Ohio, New York Quarterly, and lingo. She was a finalist for the Iowa Review Award for Literary Nonfiction and was named notable reading in the 2004 Best American Nonrequired Reading. Currently at work on a young adult novel-in-verse, she teaches at New York University and lives with her husband in Brooklyn. Callihan is a teaching artist with T&W.
- Sheila Maldonado grew up in Coney Island between Surf and Mermaid Avenues, across the street from the Atlantic Ocean. Her family is still there when they’re not in their house in Honduras. She is now an amateur Mayanist, a backup singer in a Latin music school band, and president and sole member of the Björk Fan Club, Washington Heights Chapter. Maldonado’s poems have been published in Rattapallax, Meridians, Promethean, and as part of the Center for Book Arts’ Broadsides Reading Series. She received a MA in creative writing from City College of New York and a BA in English from Brown University, and has worked as a teaching artist for T&W since 2003.
- Mary Roma teaches writing to undergraduates at Boricua College and at New York University, where she is also an academic adviser and tutor. She graduated with a MFA in writing from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and has a MA in English literature from New York University. Her writing has appeared in PLANET magazine, and she assisted in the English translation of Ground Zero, The Day the World Changed by Japanese photographer Yasuhide JoJu. In 2000, Roma curated a reading series of emerging and published writers at Good World Cafe on the Lower East Side. Currently she’s working on a memoir and short stories. This is her second year with Girls Write Now.
- Erica Silberman has written fourteen times for the Atrainplays, a twenty-four hour theater project. Her plays have been produced or developed at the Ensemble Studio Theatre, Metropolitan Playhouse, Weird Sisters, Six Figures, First Light Productions, Playwrights Horizons, and New World Stages. She was a featured writer on National Public Radio’s Studio 60 in a piece about writing under pressure of deadline. Silberman writers both screenplays and musicals and is currently producing a short film. In addition to being a Girls Write Now mentor, Silberman is a member of the Dramatists Guild of America and is the co-president of the New York Coalition of Women in the Arts & Media.
2020 VISIONS: LAREN MCCLUNG AND TRACY K. SMITH
May 9 – 6:30 PM
- Laren McClung is a poet from the Philadelphia area. She has taught courses in media studies and English for colleges and universities, including Penn State University and Arcadia University. She has earned degrees in communications and English and is pursuing a MFA in creative writing at New York University. McClung currently has fellowships with Goldwater Hospital and Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and she is an assistant international editor for Washington Square review.
- Tracy K. Smith was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, selected by Kevin Young, for The Body’s Question, winner of a 2005 Whiting Writers Award. Her second collection, Duende (Graywolf Press, 2007), won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Smith is the recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Callaloo, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Gulf Coast, Nebraska Review, and Post Road, and in such anthologies as Poetry 30, Poetry Daily, and Autumn House. Smith holds degrees in English and creative writing from Harvard College and Columbia University, and she was a Wallace Stegner Fellows in poetry at Stanford University from 1997–1999. Smith lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Princeton University.
2020 VISIONS: DEWITT HENRY, GREG SANDERS, AND NICKOLE BROWN
May 15 – 7:00 PM
Presented by Red Hen Press
- Ploughshares, which DeWitt Henry directed for its first twenty years and for which he received a Massachusetts Commonwealth Award in 1992, is regarded as one of the leading literary magazines in the country. Henry’s novel The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts won the inaugural Peter Taylor Prize. Jack Smith wrote, “The novel evokes in the reader a sense for the power of the heart and will to transform one’s self and to make claims on what’s rightfully one’s own.” The same can be said for Safe Suicide (Red Hen Press, 2008). Henry is a professor at Emerson College in Boston. He has also edited five anthologies, including Sorrows Company: Writers on Loss and Grief and (with Jame Alan McPherson) Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men. He is working on a childhood memoir and novel.
- Greg Sanders received his MFA in creative writing from The New School in 2004. His stories have appeared in a number of online and print magazines, including Mississippi Review, Pindeldyboz, and Opium Magazine, and in the anthologies Blue Cathedral and The Crucifix is Down, both published by Red Hen Press. Motel Girl, his first collection of short stories, will be published by Red Hen in June. Sanders currently lives in the East Village; earns his living as a technical writer; and is at work on a second collection of short stories, a novel, and numerous hybrid creative products.
- Nickole Brown graduated from the MFA Program for Creative Writing at Vermont College and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Arts Council. She studied English literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar and worked as an editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. Her work has appeared in the Courtland Review, Diagram, Another Chicago Magazine, Chautauqua Literary Journal, 32 Poems, the Kestrel Review, the Writer’s Chronicle, Poets & Writers, and the anthologies Sudden Stories and PP/FF. She also co-edited the anthology Air Fare: Stories, Poems & Essays on Flight. Brown lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where she works at the independent literary press Sarabande Books.
90TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION AND POETRY READING: NAOMI REPLANSKY
May 23 – 6:00-8:00 PM
2020 VISIONS: MATTHEW SHARPE AND ELIZABETH HAND
May 27 – 6:30 PM
- Matthew Sharpe, Jamestown: Sharpe is the author of the novels The Sleeping Father and Nothing Is Terrible, as well as the short-story collection Stories from the Tube. He teaches creative writing at Wesleyan University. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Zoetrope, BOMB, McSweeney’s, American Letters & Commentary, Southwest Review, and Teachers & Writers. Sharpe lives in New York City.
- Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss: Hand, a New York Times notable and multiple-award-winning author, has written eight novels, including the cult classic Waking the Moon, and several short-story collections. She is a longtime contributor to numerous publications, including the Washington Post Book World and the Village Voice Literary Supplement. She and her two children divide their time between the coast of Maine and North London.
T&W’s 40TH ANNIVERSARY: WITH HERBERT KOHL AND PHILLIP LOPATE
May 29 – 6:30-8:30 PM
- Teachers & Writers Collaborative and The New Press host a 40th anniversary T&W celebration featuring Herbert Kohl, T&W founding director and New Press author and series editor, Classics in Progressive Education. Kohl will be introduced by Phillip Lopate, poet, novelist, essayist, and author of Being with Children.
Center for Imaginative Writing
T&W’s Center for Imaginative Writing is available for rent Monday-Thursday, 8 AM-9 PM, and Friday, 8 AM-6 PM, by nonprofit organizations and publishers and by individual literary artists for book parties, readings, seminars, and other events. Conveniently located two blocks north of Penn Station, the Center is a short distance from subway, bus, and commuter rail lines.
For details, including rates and available dates, please e-mail events or call 212-691-6590.
Directions to T&W via Subway
- Take the A, C, or E train to 34th Street-Penn Station and Eighth Avenue or to Times Square
- Take the 1, 2, or 3 train to 34th Street-Penn Station and Seventh Avenue or to Times Square
- Take the N, Q, R, or W train to 34th Street-Herald Square and Sixth Avenue or to Times Square
- Take the B, D, F, or V train to 34th Street-Herald Square and Sixth Avenue
- Take the 4 or 5 train to 59th Street and transfer to a downtown F, N, R, or W train, or take the 7 train or Shuttle from Grand Central to Times Square
- Take the 6 train to 51st Street and transfer to a downtown E or V train, or take the 7 train or Shuttle from Grand Central to Times Square
