A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
by Gabriela Denise Frank Throughout time, the powers of poets have been hailed as nothing short of mystical. Poets are seers and oracles. They treat with gods, muses, ghosts. Their carefully crafted lines conjure images that, to readers and listeners, incarnate ephemeral ideas into forms solid enough to see and touch—at least by the mind. […]
Because so much of the work of our Writers in the Schools program happens behind the curtain—in public school rooms and hospital rooms, in notebooks and on sheets of scrap paper, in classroom anthologies and letterpress broadsides—it’s always a remarkable moment when students take the stage at our Year End Readings. Across two nights of […]
By Kathleen Flenniken, WITS Writer-in-Residence Andrea Davis Pinkney has written a moving and imaginative story-in-poems for middle grade readers called The Red Pencil (Little Brown, 2014). The Red Pencil is a Global Reading Challenge selection this year and currently available as an audiobook to all Seattle Public Library cardholders until March 19. Amira is twelve […]
By Peter Mountford, WITS Writer-in-Residence For the seventh year in a row, I’ve been fortunate to be part of a group of WITS writers who’ve gone to Port Townsend for two weeks in December. While Seattle has gone through some dramatic changes in these last seven years—to the extent that I sometimes get lost in […]
Applications to join the 2018/19 WITS Writers-in-Residence corps is now open! To download the 2018/19 Writer Application Guidelines, click here. Writers in the Schools (WITS), a program of Seattle Arts & Lectures, is looking for creative writers—poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, and cartoonists/graphic novelists—who are passionate about teaching the power and pleasure of writing […]
By Arianne True, WITS Writer-in-Residence This past week, my classes focused on details – what and where they are, and putting them into our own writing. We defined details, went over senses, and totally rocked an exercise on noticing them all around us in the classroom. For practice finding details in poems, we read Ada […]
By Karen Finneyfrock, WITS Writer-in-Residence I’ve have success and fun in the classroom connecting students with poetry that feature the seasons or the weather. Each November, I bring my fifth grade classes the poem “This is a Letter” by Rebecca Dunham. Young students are especially drawn to images like “the broken confetti of late fall leaves.” […]
Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 14th, scholar of religions Reza Aslan will give an original, multi-media presentation on his new book, God: A Human History, an interfaith exploration of how different ideas of God have both united and divided us for millennia, as part of our 2017/18 SAL Presents Series. Tickets are still available here! In anticipation of Reza’s […]
By Alex Gallo-Brown, WITS Writer-in-Residence When I walked into Ms. Simmons-Rice’s class at Nathan Hale High School last month, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had taught writing at the community college level, but never to high school students, and certainly not to high school freshman, a time I remember with regret and a […]
This essay was commissioned by SAL for the occasion of the final event in our 2016/17 Sherman Alexie Loves Series on Thursday, May 11, at Town Hall Seattle. First Loves: Patricia Park, Ariel Schrag, and Sunil Yapa will feature these debut novelists that Sherman Alexie loves, as well as dramatic readings by three local actors. For more […]