W.o.o.t.s.

Congrats to all the students who read their work at BiPartisan cafe last Thursday night! The space was packed to standing-room-only with friends, parents, siblings, teachers, WITS writers, and the students courageous enough to share their writing. We’re looking forward to receiving submissions for the WITS anthology!

Despite being interrupted by a fire alarm and having to evacuate the museum into the park blocks, Lincoln students and their fans (including parents, siblings, teachers, and friends) had a great end-of-residency reading. At the end, the Lincoln teachers presented WITS writer Laura Moulton with a book of found poems they had made with their [...]

On a sunny Monday evening, students read their work at Girasole Pizza in St. Johns for an audience of parents, teachers, WITS writers, and other fans.

“It’s important to know that all stories have been told, but you can bring something new to them. Inspiration comes from everything; it isn’t something magical. You sit in front of the computer and you hope the writing happens.” Chimamanda Adichie offered this straightforward truth to a group of over one hundred students and faculty [...]

Thirty students from all the PPS high schools rocked the Mission Theater during the first city-wide slam poetry competition, Verselandia! Three students from each school (who had won their school’s playoffs) had three minutes each to perform an original poem. Names were drawn at random from a fishbowl and a panel of five judges held [...]

The day after MCing Verselandia! Portland’s first city-wide poetry slam for high school students, World Poetry Slam champion Anis Mojgani visited the Roosevelt High School writing center and met with fifty Rough Riders.  ”Do you ever run into people who don’t take art and poetry seriously as a job?” asked a student.  ”All the time,” said [...]

“Geography is destiny; Napoleon said that, ” Abraham Verghese recites to a group of Jefferson High School students. He proceeds to describe how this maxim had proved true in his own life. His parents, both Indian teachers living in the Southern state of Kerala, had met and married in Ethiopia, where they had been recruited [...]

Last Wednesday, WITS writers convened at Literary Arts to eat Ethiopian food cart fare and talk shop. The dinner conversation covered such topics as how to continue your writing practice when you’re teaching, writing groups in Portland, and how to share your writing process with students. Teaching came up too, of course–from the best lesson [...]

Chaos reigned under the marquee Tuesday as precisely 794 book-crazed teenagers, high on fiction and spoiling for a lecture, stormed the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. They came from as far away as Corbett High School in the Gorge to hear Heidi Durrow talk about her Bellwether Prize-winning novel, and this year’s Everybody Reads book, The [...]

Local graphic artist and WITS writer Nicole Georges will be contributing illustrations to Portlandia’s “Most Portland Thing Ever” contest. The show’s creators picked five submissions from many and asked Nicole to provide illustrations to accompany the hilarious Portland stories. Read the whole story here.