New Projects/Events
Essay on Octavia Butler’s simultaneous adherence to and rejection of various literary communities and traditions in THE BLACK IMAGINATION.
First piece on Pillsbury House Theatre‘s upcoming production of “The Road Weeps, The Well Runs Dry,” and community engagement. In my new role as a “Storyteller,” I will produce five written or video pieces over the course of 10 months.
Catch me and some esteemed colleagues talking about approaches to teaching creative writing in higher ed classrooms at the 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago, Saturday, March 3, 12-1:15 pm. Here’s the deets:
S170. Colorblind or Color Coded?: Cross-Institutional Comparisons of Race and Creative Writing Pedagogy
(Jennifer Dobbs, Lisa Lewis, Tim Hernandez, Charles Fort, Shannon Gibney)
Wabash Room, Palmer House Hilton, 3rd Floor
Do we teach in a post-racial world where creative writing pedagogy can take a colorblind approach? Writers from a range of pedagogical contexts address the question of student expectations and reading practices of literature by writers of color, along with strategies toward working through racialized assumptions, such as: writers of color are political and white writers focus on artistic quality; race exists only as political correctness; a writer’s ethnicity defines that writer’s audience.
Cross your fingers…By Fall 2012, the first cohort of students should be able to receive an AA with Emphasis in African Diaspora Studies at Minneapolis Community & Technical College — one of the only (maybe the first??) such programs in the country. More on this to come.
