By Amy Worob Before leaving for winter break, I had made copies of one of my favorite texts that I’ve used with my sophomores for the past four years–Andrew Lam’s essay “Letter to a Young Refugee” from his book Perfume Dreams–a beautifully written mentor text that is both accessible and challenging at the same time.…
By Kim Johnson As Tommy Orange, author of There, There delivered his keynote speech to a packed conference of NCTE attendees, he told brief stories, or “episodes”––snippets of life events that reinforce a particular idea. Orange shared how unlikely it was that he was standing on this stage––a bestselling Native American author, finalist for the…
By Kristen R. Strom “I have always struggled with academic writing. I constantly work fiercely to set up the structure of my essays and make sure all the points are valid and make logical sense, yet I always end up getting undesirable grades.” “I usually loathe writing in general because all the prompts that we…
By Cait O’Connor Language is an integral part of being human. How we read, speak, love, rage, and write are all brought together by how we, as humans, express ourselves. But the way we teach argument in the American classroom leaves room for debate. And, frankly, this debate asks many participants, specifically marginalized people (queer/trans…
by Alison Heron-Hruby, based on a study conducted by Annamary Consalvo, Ann David, Katrina Jansky, Alison Heron-Hruby, Marie LeJeune, and Amy Vetter When I (Alison) first decided to be a writer at the age of ten, it was because I loved Judy Blume novels. I wanted to create stories just like hers. Since then, I…
by Amy Vetter, Annamary Consalvo, Ann David, Alison Hruby, Katrina Jansky, and Marie LeJeune When I taught high school English, I became familiar with the dramatic moans and groans from some students after I said, We get to write today! Some students, clearly uncomfortable with this task, resisted by saying, I’m not a writer or…
By Barbara Herzner and Kristen Hawley Turner “Megan’s Titanic Presentation.” My calendar notification reminded me to shift my work schedule the next day so that I could “climb aboard the Titanic” in my daughter’s third grade classroom. I had witnessed her enthusiasm for writing grow in Ms. Herzner’s class over the year, and I did…
by Ken Lindblom We all have different relationships with other people. Some people love us, some people don’t, and others don’t have enough information to form an opinion yet. When we write, we also have relationships with the people who read our writing. And our writer-reader relationships are as varied as our flesh-and-blood ones. One…
by Alexandra Cavallo Duvantee, a junior and one of the brightest in his class, asked me to look over his college essay. I found that many of his sentences didn’t make sense due to word choice. He told me he had used the online thesaurus. When I asked what he meant by referring to his…
Writers Who Care 