Articles, essays, editorials, and meditations on T&W’s mission, “educating the imagination.”
See complete submission guidelines here.
By Charlotte Pence On a recent night in England, where I spent the fall semester teaching abroad, I ended up as I often did, sitting at a sticky pub table older than the Tudor dynasty, exchanging travel stories with friends. Doug, an expat from Ireland, began telling me a tale from his time in Vietnam….
By Libby Cudmore I make my living as a writer. On any given day, I might put 1,500 words in a novel before most people have even had their first cup of coffee; followed by a full day of interviews and articles for The Freeman’s Journal/Hometown Oneonta newspapers in Cooperstown, New York; only to come…
By Yusef Komunyakaa I’ve often said that the ideal collaboration is a dialogue and negotiation, but one must also underscore this: a fruitful working together embodies cooperation and freedom. In fact, the single most important tool in process is freedom; but it resides outside the realm of a happening. For me, and I hope I’m also…
By Gabriel Brownstein Editors note: This article was originally published in Teachers & Writers Magazine 2007. When asked if he would contribute a piece to the magazine for T&W’s 40th anniversary year, novelist and short story writer Gabriel Brownstein responded with immediate enthusiasm: “Teachers & Writers was a huge part of my life as a…
By Peter Markus So I’m talking all the time about the power of words, about how words matter, about how a poem can help us make sense of the world around us, etc., etc., when out of the blue wide-eyed Aniya, a third-grader here in Detroit, raises her hand and asks me a question I…
By Caron Levis The classroom phone rang as Mrs. Pearson’s first-graders tumbled in, pulling off coats and scarves, shoving backpacks into the overstuffed closet along the wall. As Mrs. Pearson excused herself to answer the call, a small girl swimming in a large, red sweatshirt offered me a plastic flower that she’d made, “because you’re…
By Susan Straub T&W was a nourishing parent for my neophyte and developing Read To Me Program. Through T&W’s generous welcome, I got immediate street cred and access to the NYC Board of Ed’s teen parent program, LYFE. Additionally, I was able to apply for grants available to nonprofit organizations to develop and expand….
By Rachel DeWoskin My eleven-year-old student Siran turned to me recently during a conversation about Shel Silverstein’s poetry and said, in her native Chinese, “English is so wasteful!” I had just been thinking the opposite, that rhyme is a lovely expression of compression and economy. “Why?” I asked. She pointed to a “k” at the…
By Kelly Quayle Richie is five foot nothing and not even a hundred pounds, just months out of elementary school. He wears a SpongeBob backpack high on his shoulders and Gap Kids khakis picked out by his mother. He’s never seen an R-rated movie, never been reprimanded in school, and rarely comes to class without…
By Ben Berman How does a writing teacher return to the “beginner’s mind” of students, and how does doing so influence his teaching practice? Ben Berman shares how the frustrations he experienced and the lessons he learned when he tried to write a screenplay changed the way he approaches teaching writing to his high school…