Articles, essays, editorials, and meditations on T&W’s mission, “educating the imagination.”
See complete submission guidelines here.
By Lesley Machon My calendars have always been marked with stars for two important occasions: Independence Day and the first day of school. If I close my eyes I can still taste the red, white, and blue of rocket popsicles at 4th of July parades, and smell the lingering char of fireworks sizzling skyward from…
By Olaya Barr and India Gonzalez The two of us have been co-teaching sixth-graders at PS 122, Mamie Fay in Queens, for the past six months. During this time we have learned a great deal about ourselves as individual teachers and as a pair. Because of this, we thought it would be beneficial to present…
by Grace Paley This transcript of Paley’s speech at T&W’s Educating the Imagination forum was originally published in 1996. —Ed. I just looked over at my children [in the audience]. It’s very embarrassing to be spoken about in front of one’s children. Recently I was trying to remember exactly how we started Teachers & Writers Collaborative….
By Peter Markus “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” This is the poet Theodore Roethke doing the saying, nearly six decades ago. Could the times we are living in now be any darker? It’s true: every generation sees itself as the last. We are post-apocalyptically obsessed. And yet I’m sure, through this,…
2018 Runner-up of the Bechtel Prize By Glenis Redmond Author and T&W Board member Tayari Jones selected Glenis Redmond’s essay, “Poetry as a Mirror,” as the runner-up for the 2018 Bechtel Prize. Teachers & Writers Collaborative awards the annual Bechtel Prize to the author of an essay that explores themes related to creative writing, arts education,…
By Phyllis Meshulam I. On the night of October 8, 2017, aptly-named Diablo winds from the east, gusting at as much as 70 miles per hour, carried embers over the mountains that separate Sonoma and Napa Counties in wine-country California. The resulting massive wildfires burned more than 5,000 homes to the ground in Sonoma County…
2018 Winner of the Bechtel Prize By Julie Landsman Author and T&W Board member Tayari Jones selected Julie Landsman’s essay “Words, Images, and Music: How We Enter” as the 2018 Bechtel Prize winner. Teachers & Writers Collaborative awards the annual Bechtel Prize to the author of an essay that explores themes related to creative writing,…
By Ralph Fletcher The text below is an excerpt from The Writing Teacher’s Companion: Embracing Choice, Voice, Purpose & Play by Ralph Fletcher. This excerpt was reprinted with permission from Scholastic. Conferring is simply a conversation with another writer. Let’s not make it more complicated than it needs to be. —Ruth Ayres The writing time is the…
By Justin Parmenter Ask any English teacher what he or she could use more of, and chances are you’ll get the same answer. Classroom resources are great, more money would be nice, but what we really need is more time. Just like in any other discipline, English teachers have way more curriculum than we can…
By John Oliver Simon In the winter of 1971, I was subsisting, barely, selling self-printed books of my own poetry along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. One late night I stumbled into a bar and was greeted by a woman we called Sister Mary, who sported full nun drag with vermilion lipstick, a modest wimple barely…