R226. Writing Toward the Future: High School Creative Writing Programs

Room 2B, Washington State Convention Center, Level 2
Thursday, February 27, 2014
3:00 pm to 4:15 pm

 

As writing programs multiply around the nation, high school writing majors in arts schools are the new frontier. What does such an early emphasis on the craft of writing offer young students during the high school years and beyond? What should a writer hoping to teach at such a program expect? Instructors and program directors of arts school creative writing programs across the country explore what intensive training in creative writing can offer today’s youth and today’s teachers of writing.


Participants

Moderator:

Monika Cassel is chair of the English Department at New Mexico School for the Arts, a statewide charter arts school. She is launching a creative writing minor at the school in 2013-14 as a pilot for a writing major. She is working on a translation of the German poet Durs Grünbein’s Porzellan.

Jamie Figueroa teaches creative writing at New Mexico School for the Arts, a dual credit college course offered through the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction has been published in various literary reviews. She is at work on her MFA in Creative Writing.

Kim Henderson chairs the Creative Writing department at Idyllwild Arts Academy, an arts boarding high school. She is the author of a chapbook of flash fiction, The Kind of Girl, which won the 2012 Rose Metal Press chapbook contest.

Anne-Marie Oomen is author of Pulling Down the Barn and House of Fields, both Michigan Notable Books, An American Map: Essays; and Uncoded Woman. She is instructor of creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy and The Solstice MFA at Pine Manor College (MA).

Scott Gould teaches at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts. Since 2006, eight of his students have been named US Presidential Scholars in the Arts; 9 have won $10,000 portfolio prizes from the Scholastic Writing Awards. His fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review, Carolina Quarterly, and Bull: Men's Fiction.

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February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center