W.o.o.t.s.

On a freezing Monday night, students from Cleveland took the stage in the soft glow of TaborSpace and read their poetry, prose, and scenes from plays. Every seat was filled with parents, fellow students, and the WITS writers who worked with these students during the previous semester (Donna Prinzmetal and Matt Zrebski). The applause for [...]

  Students in Marie Pearson’s 3-D Design class at Wilson High School wrote puppet shows with WITS writer Cindy Williams Gutierrez and performed their plays (with the puppets they designed) for their next door neighbors at Rieke Elementary.          

Are you a young artist looking to engage with your community? The Portland Art Museum’s Artist in Residence Lexa Walsh will be teaching a workshop called Socially Engaged Art Making that encourages students to explore the relationship between art and community.  This is a free 10-week course in which young artists will work in an array [...]

The December 8 WITS reading for Madison High School students was a great success.  An unprecedented number of Madison students, teachers, families and friends packed the BiPartisan Cafe to join WITS writers John Isaacson and Hunt Holman.  Cheers to the great audience and participants!  

On Tuesday December 6, Powell’s City of Books hosted the release party for the 2010-2011 WITS anthology of student writing, No One Carries an Umbrella Here. More than 130 students, family members and other community members came out to celebrate student writers reading their poems, plays, prose and comics from the anthology. The above photo [...]

Tom Brokaw made time during a busy Portland visit to meet with students from Wilson High School at the new Literary Arts event space downtown. He told the student journalists they are coming of age at a critical time. While the future of print journalism is uncertain, Brokaw said he remains optimistic that “the culture [...]

This November, Figment is teaming up with The National Writing Project to sponsor the Junot Diaz Writing Contest, judged by Pulitzer prize-winning author Junot Diaz.  Figment is an online writing community where you can share your writing, connect with other readers, and discover new stories and authors.               Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, stands out for his [...]

Each year, Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia sponsors a poetry contest open to high school girls. Now in its 48th year, the contest awards honors and prizes for the best poems submitted by girls who are sophomores or juniors in high school. The contest, named for Nancy Thorpe, Hollins class of 1960, aims to support and [...]

For Stephen and Bianca, teachers at at Metropolitan Learning Center, the city is a classroom. They regularly take their students off-campus to see performances of all kinds, including the Arts & Lectures Series. When asked which part of the Students to the Schnitz program is more important, the free books or the free tickets to [...]

On Tuesday November 18th Literary Arts held its annual WITS fundraiser luncheon, hosted by Blue Hour. Members of the Literary Arts staff and Board of Directors gathered with almost 200 friends, writers, teachers and other members of the community to support WITS. We are thrilled to share that the event was a huge success, raising [...]