Detroit’s InsideOut Literary Arts Project (iO) is celebrating its twentieth birthday this year with the publication of To Light a Fire: 20 Years with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project. iO was started by Terry Blackhawk, then an English teacher at Mumford High School. The organization, which began with pilot programs at five high public high schools in 1995, now provides writer-led writing programs at thirty schools each year.
Citywide Poets, founded at iO in 1997, gives high school students the opportunity to pursue writing more deeply during out-of-school time. In 2009, InsideOut received the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.
Teachers & Writers Magazine will publish selections from To Light a Fire over the next few months, beginning with Matthew Olzmann’s “How to Turn an Ordinary Floor into an Oceanside Beach with One Hand.” Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, received the 2011 Kundiman Prize and was published by Alice James Books. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, New England Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Olzmann is a visiting professor of creative writing in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College.
Special Offer: Through November 15, 2015, Teachers & Writers Magazine readers will receive a 30 percent discount on To Light a Fire. To receive your discount, enter code TW15.
Teachers & Writers Magazine is published by Teachers & Writers Collaborative as a resource for teaching the art of writing to people of all ages. The online magazine presents a wide range of ideas and approaches, as well as lively explorations of T&W’s mission to celebrate the imagination and create greater equity in and through the literary arts.
