Virtual AWP Pedagogy welcomes a roundtable discussion on Moving the Creative Writing Classroom Online with Lucy Biederman, Tamara Girardi & Lex Williford. AWP Board Member Stephanie Vanderslice moderates this exploration of teaching strategies in a suddenly-virtual academic environment. These creative writing professors hail from different parts of the country and specialize in different genres, but they all agree that kindness in the classroom is paramount during this unusual time. Lucy, Tamara, and Lex discuss setting clear expectations while encouraging students to take risks, and they explore best practices in grading and leveraging technology to provide feedback. Their conversation premieres on Tuesday, December 8, 2020 at 6:00 p.m. ET on the AWP YouTube channel. Books from this event can be purchased on the AWP Bookshop affiliate page.

The premiere of this Virtual AWP event will also include a live Q&A on YouTube. To receive a reminder and a direct link to this free event, and updates on future events, register online. *Registering is free, and you do not have to be member of AWP to do so. However, to participate in the live Q&A you must be signed into YouTube.

Dr. Lucy Biederman is an assistant professor of English at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio, where she teaches creative writing in three genres, first-year writing, and professional writing. She is the author of The Walmart Book of the Dead, which won the 2017 Vine Leaves Press Vignette Award and was a Finalist for the Foreword Book of the Year in the fantasy category. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in North American Review, Poetry, AGNI, Ploughshares, and Pleiades.

Dr. Tamara Girardi is an associate professor of English at HACC, Central Pennsylvania’s Community College, where she teaches creative writing, technical writing, composition, and literature online. She studied fiction at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and writes young adult novels and picture books. Her debut picture book, Why, Daddy? Why? is forthcoming from Familius. She has coedited the essay collections Ideology and Identity in Young Adult Literature: Connections to the Composition Classroom (McFarland); Theories and Strategies for Teaching Creative Writing Online (Routledge), and contributed to several others. Dr. Girardi also serves as a Digital, Multimodal, and Multimedia section editor for the Creative Writing Studies Journal.

Professor Lex Williford is the founding online MFA director and former bilingual MFA program chair at the University of Texas at El Paso. His recent novella, Balsa and Tissue Paper, is available as both a Solos selection in the Ploughshares’ Fall 2019 longform issue and as an e-book; his other books have won the Iowa Short Fiction Award and the Rose Metal Flash Fiction chapbook award.