Innovation in the Creative Writing Classroom

A conversation with the 2025 Bechtel Prize winners.

Kristen Moraine, Anna Dunlavey, Peter Markus and Joshua Garcia

On July 17, 2025, Teachers & Writers Magazine hosted a conversation about innovation in the creative writing classroom with 2025 Bechtel Prize winner Kristen Moraine, runner-up Anna Dunlavey, and honorable mention Peter Markus. The panelists shared about their essays and discussed the trial, error, and inspiration for their innovative methods of teaching creative writing. Teachers & Writers Magazine awards the Bechtel Prize annually for an essay describing a teaching experience, project, or activity that demonstrates innovation in creative writing instruction. Learn more about the Bechtel Prize here.

When we read great poetry and literature, they’re often stories of struggle, stories of sorrow and pain, but the undercurrent of all of them is hope and resilience. And I think the more we can share that with students, the more we can help them deal with what’s happening now.

—Kristen Moraine

Read the essays discussed in this panel:

“A Place for Us: Student Poetry that Looks Back to Move Forward” by Kristen Moraine

“Call Me by My Name: Poetry and Translanguaging in the Multilingual Classroom” by Anna Dunlavey

“In the Beginning Was the Word and the Word Was Blue: Exploring the Blues through Poetry and Song” by Peter Markus

Kristen Moraine

Kristen Moraine is an author and English teacher living in the Pacific Northwest with her family. Her work has appeared previously in Teachers & Writers Magazine (May 2024), and her fiction, essays, and poetry have been featured in Literary Mama, OnePotato.com, The Gyroscope Review, and elsewhere. Kristen earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of San Francisco. She is currently seeking representation for her contemporary YA novel.

Anna Dunlavey
Anna Dunlavey is a teacher and writer. She has taught English as a New Language and English Language Arts at schools in the Bronx and Brooklyn, as well as in Lille, France, through the Teaching Assistant Program in France. She studied Creative Writing and Modern Languages at Kenyon College and obtained her Master's in TESOL at The City College of New York. Her work has appeared on the Key West Literary Seminar Blog, Littoral.
Peter Markus is the Senior Writer with InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit. His book, Inside My Pencil: Teaching Poetry in Detroit Public Schools, offers readers an inside look at his approach in the classroom. Over the years his essays on teaching have appeared with some regularity in Teachers & Writers Magazine. His other books include the book of poems When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds, published by Wayne State University Press in 2021, as well as the novel Bob, or Man on Boat and a book of stories, We Make Mud, both published by Dzanc Books. He has a new book of poems, The River at the End of the River, coming out from Dzanc in the Fall of 2026.

Joshua Garcia is the author of Pentimento (Black Lawrence Press 2024), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His poetry has appeared in Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Passages North, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the College of Charleston and has received a Stadler Fellowship from Bucknell University and an Emerge—Surface—Be Fellowship from The Poetry Project. He lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York.

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