2017 Runner-up of the Bechtel Prize By Eileen Sutton Author Garth Greenwell selected Eileen Sutton’s “Dear Mr. Doctorow” as the runner-up for the 2017 Bechtel Prize. Teachers & Writers Collaborative awards the Bechtel Prize to the author of an exemplary essay that explores themes related to creative writing, arts education, and/or the imagination. Greenwell said, “This…
2017 Winner of the Bechtel Prize By M.K. Rainey Author Garth Greenwell selected M.K. Rainey’s essay, “I Hate Writing: On the Necessity of Being Vulnerable,” as the recipient of the 2017 Bechtel Prize. Teachers & Writers Collaborative awards the Bechtel Prize to the author of an exemplary essay that explores themes related to creative writing,…
2013 Winner of the Bechtel Prize By Chris Belden “I died in 1960 from a prison sentence and poetry brought me back to life.” –Etheridge Knight 1. Follow the rules of the institution Before each weekly workshop session, store your valuables and any unauthorized items in the locker provided. Remove any metal objects, including your…
2012 Winner of the Bechtel Prize By Barbara Flug Colin For Robert May 19, 2012 She is speaking softly, boldly. as she did when she was my fifth-grade student. But now she is a post-doc fellow. She is telling me about the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) show she saw yesterday. The genius of…
2011 Winner of the Bechtel Prize By Janet L. Bland It started with a possum running right in front of the van. There are many things that I don’t want to happen when I am driving a van full of my students (including, but not limited to, vomiting, flat tires, love triangles, and snowstorms),…
2009 Winner of the Bechtel Prize By Emily Raboteau The students call it “shitty college,” and I can’t exactly blame them. In the North Academic Center building, the walls are made of cinder blocks, there are mice in the hallways and the ceiling tiles are falling down. There’s a myth that NAC was designed by an…
2005 Winner of the Bechtel Prize By Diane LeBlanc Imagined air unweaves our losses and dissolves ourselves into ourselves, scatters us into leaves, and you and I become whatever words we may have come so far to say. —Henry Taylor, “Learning the Language” My grandmother Rosa was the first woman I ever heard speak with…
2004 Winner of the Bechtel Prize By Sam Swope A Tree Is As I walked through Central Park to the subway that September, already leaves were beginning to turn. I was excited by the project I had planned for my immigrant fifth graders. There were 36 of them, from more than 20 countries, and I’d…
2010 Winner of the Bechtel Prize By Garth Greenwell Already it’s nearly dark, the mid-February afternoon fading aggressively to night. My twice daily walk, the two kilometers of Alexander Malinov Boulevard separating home from work, extends a straight shot before me, the gray of the pavement indistinguishable from the worn snow I remember pristine this…
2008 Winner of the Bechtel Prize By Michael Bazzett I teach in a one-hundred-year-old building. Red brick, ivy, hardwood floors. It looks every inch the school. When it was renovated six or seven years ago, a drop-down ceiling appeared in my third-floor classroom to hide the galvanized duct work. The ceiling was uneven, with two…