A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
By Anastacia-Renee Tolbert, WITS Writer-in-Residence Lately, I’ve been reading a host of fiction and nonfiction from writers who have come before me, thinking about my mortality and the current state of the world as a woman of color writing, teaching and mothering. So recently, I asked high school students to write editorial essays. To begin with, some […]
By Kathleen Flenniken, WITS Writer-in-Residence A friend of a friend was looking for a poem her fifth-grade son could memorize for a class project. The question came to me and I made a couple of suggestions. The boy chose “Eating Poetry” by Mark Strand. His mother sent a photo of him studying the poem with […]
By Corinne Manning, WITS Writer-in-Residence The day after the election, I carried a tote-bag full of ferns, poetry by June Jordan, and a memoir in comics by Lynda Barry into the high school. To my students, I tried to introduce the idea of imagination, of finding ways to tap into their sensory experiences, even when the […]
By Imani R. Sims, WITS Writer-in-Residence 33 student eyes, all staring at the screen as Martin Luther King Jr. takes the podium: But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we […]
By Jeanine Walker, WITS Writer-in-Residence By the time this post is published, we will have endured several tens of other injustices, threats on our freedoms, and evasions from the new presidential administration, and the idea of “alternative facts” will, I imagine, be filed under the Folder of Growing Insanities—which is to say, not quite forgotten […]
By Matt Gano, WITS Writer-in-Residence There’s real magic flying from the fingertips of the young poets at The Center School. We speak in terms of allusion in terms of empathy and connectivity. We cast spells in misspelled text and bend symbols of meaning to tease reality. We deal in magic as poets, as writers, as […]
By Sierra Nelson, WITS Writer-in-Residence Does the word Wolf move differently than El Lupo? Do we experience anything different in our bodies when we say the Russian word волк (pronounced “volk”) compared to the Japanese word 狼 [おおかみ Ôkami]? I was excited to explore these questions of language and translation in my WITS residency, working […]
As summer nears to a close, we asked our Writers in the Schools teaching artists to tell us what they did on their summer vacation: what they read, wrote, researched, ate, worked on, and, of course, what fun they had. Read on for a glimpse into 8 local writers’ summers. Late summer blackberry pie count = […]