On July 17, 2024, Teachers & Writers Magazine hosted a conversation about innovation in the creative writing classroom with 2024 Bechtel Prize winner Abriana Jetté, runner-up Éireann Lorsung, and honorable mention Reagan Ross. 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.
I think all our forms are forms for invention, and that includes the classroom.
—Éireann Lorsung
Read the essays discussed in this panel:
“Flexing Our Rhyming Muscles: Introducing the Ghazal” by Abriana Jetté
“The Slowest Writing in the World: We Use a Needle and Thread to Learn to Write” by Éireann Lorsung
“Write Your Own Lord of the Flies with Dyslexia: \/尺⌽┻𝝣 7≠レ尺 ≠⌴乙 レ≠尺⌴ ≠𝞝 ┻冊𝝣 𝞝レ⌽3” by Reagan Ross
Abriana Jetté is an internationally published writer whose work has been supported by the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and has appeared or is forthcoming in PublicBooks, Best New Poets, PLUME, Tampa Review, Poetry New Zealand, and other places.
Éireann Lorsung
Éireann Lorsung works in a field of images, objects, movement, and texts. Her publications include Music for Landing Planes By, Her book, and The Century (all from Milkweed Editions). A 2016 NEA Fellow, she teaches at University College Dublin. More: ohbara.com.
Author photo credit: Ann Bartges.
Reagan Ross
Reagan Ross is a writer and video essayist from Los Angeles, CA. A Teach for America alum, Reagan has worked in special education for 15 years. They are currently studying creative writing at UCLA and working on a YA novel. You can find their video essays on YouTube under Nats Can Fly.
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.
