T216.
Teaching toward Justice: Student Voice & Power in Creative Writing
Thursday, March 24, 2022
1:45 pm to 2:45 pm
For too long, creative writing courses have held themselves outside politics and current events, invoking ideals of the “timeless” and “universal.” But antiracist creative writing classrooms can be sites of transformational action and resistance, led by students. Our cross-genre teaching methods include an antiracist writing workshop, student-led projects, community-based fieldwork, student publishing on digital platforms, collaborative storytelling, and intentional community building.
Participants
Catina Bacote is a 2021–2022 Jerome Hill Artist and American Association of University Women Fellow. Her essays have appeared in This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home, Ploughshares, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, and others. She teaches at St. John’s University in New York City.
Helen Betya Rubinstein has taught at CUNY schools, University of Iowa, Yale, and The New School, where her current courses follow an inquiry-to-action model. Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Jewish Currents, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere, and she works one-on-one with other writers as a coach.
Leora Fridman is author of My Fault, among other works of prose, poetry, and translation. She holds degrees with honors from Brown University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has taught online and in person for universities, homes, and community groups since 2004.
Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom and coeditor of The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. Find her at www.antiracistworkshop.com.
Steven Alvarez specializes in literacy studies and bilingual education with a focus on Mexican immigrant communities. He teaches courses at St. John’s University ranging from ethnographic methods, visual rhetoric, and “taco literacy.” He is the author of two books and three volumes of poetry.
