Thanks to the 2015
Beltran Family Teaching Award for Innovative Teaching & Mentoring at the Kelly Writers House (University of Pennsylvania), I'll be given an opportunity to create an event for faculty and students in the 2015/2016 academic year. I'm so grateful to my university, the KWH, and my dear students, who nominated me for the award.
Whatever Doesn't Kill You, the Shebooks anthology featuring
Nest. Flight. Sky. along with five additional pieces by exquisite writers (and edited by Laura Fraser), won a Silver IPPY Award. We're so happy for Laura, especially, who has put so much of her soul into
Shebooks.The 2
015 Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of English accepted a proposal on teaching creativity and responsibility through the arts that will bring together the amazing illustrator
Melissa Sweet, two fantastic teachers (Glenda Cowen-Funk and Paul Hankins), and me. I can't wait for this. And: it will be my first time ever to Minneapolis.
I found
One Thing Stolen in bookstores, when I wasn't even looking for it. Huge thanks to Forever Young Adult, for
this generous review of the book.
There must have been some magic involved.
There (on a dark street at the National Harbor on a cold night) I stood with Ginee Seo and Sally Kim of Chronicle Books; we'd just emerged from a wonderful meal. There, coming toward us, was Paul W. Hankins, whose Twitter handle reveals him to be a "reader, writer, wonder-er, and teacher of English/AP English Language/Composition at Silver Creek High School," though everyone already knows him for his passionate advocacy of youth, words, and innovative teaching. A conversation that began (in person) that night continued on Twitter and Facebook and soon the conversation was embracing one Glenda Cowen-Funk, a supreme teaching goddess and master/mistress, who began to tell me stories about the way she teaches her high school students in Idaho.
You want to know how to teach
The Great Gatsby? Ask Glenda. You want to see
Beowulf come to life? Rush travel your way to her classroom. You want to know how lucky I am? Glenda has been reading
One Thing Stolen. She's been reading, she's been musing, and I've been learning from her.
Yesterday I asked if some of Glenda's beautiful musings about the book might be shared more broadly. Generously, Glenda said yes. And so, with deepest appreciation for teachers who bring such enormous creativity to the classroom and such kindness to writers, I share Glenda's thought-provoking words.
One Thing Stolen is a nest of words, pieced together to build a shelter. Like Laurie Halse Anderson does in SPEAK, Kephart has created a character who cannot speak, only she does, punctuating streams of consciousness."
— Glenda Cowen-Funk, NEA Master Teacher Project, NBCT, Teacher at S. D. # 25, Highland High School, Pocatello, Idaho
