Educating The Imagination Writing Poetry Writing Fiction Inventing Language Bi Lingual Cross Cultural Evaluation Reading First Last A Look Back

This book contains 33 creative writers presenting ideas and techniques for exploring poetry writing, fiction writing, translation, practical aesthetics, creative reading and the imagination. Selected from the very best articles in Teachers & Writers Magazine over 17 years, this two volumes (sold separately) offers a comprehensive multitude of ideas and techniques for writing in the classroom

In the two volumes of Educating The Imagination, fifty-five creative writers present a multitude of ideas and techniques for writing in the classroom: poetry writing; fiction writing; playwriting; writing about folklore, history, and science; translation and writing across cultures; bookmaking; writing parodies; the importance of stories; practical aesthetics; creative reading; funny experiences with words; the history of punctuation; memories of high school English teachers and other legendary figures; and that great, alluring, dangerous, delightful mystery known as the imagination. The seventy-two informal essays come from the past seventeen years of "Teachers & Writers" magazine, with practical ideas and exercises that are still fresh, useful, and inspiring. Educating The Imagination invites us to take a new look at the imagination and the ways it can enrich our classrooms and our lives. These ideas and exercises are as appropriate for the small group workshop and the individual aspiring writer at home, as they are for the formal curriculum of classroom instruction. -- Midwest Book Review

Growing out of recent pedagogical developments in creative writing studies and perceived barriers to teaching the subject in secondary education schools, this book creates conversations between secondary and post-secondary teachers aimed at introducing and improving creative writing instruction in teaching curricula for young people. Challenging assumptions and lore regarding the teaching of creative writing, this book examines new and engaging techniques for infusing creative writing into all types of language arts instruction, offering inclusive and pedagogically sound alternatives that consider the needs of a diverse range of students. With careful attention given to creative writing within current standards-based educational systems, Imaginative Teaching Through Creative Writing confronts and offers solutions to the perceived difficulty of teaching the subject in such environments. Divided into two sections, section one sees post-secondary instructors address pedagogical techniques and concerns such as workshop, revision, and assessment before section two explores hands-on activities and practical approaches to instruction. Focusing on an invaluable and underrepresented area of creative writing studies, this book begins a much-needed conversation about the future of creative writing instruction at all levels and the benefits of collaboration across the secondary/post-secondary divide.

“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017 A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017 A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017 An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is New York Times bestselling author Jason Reynolds’s electrifying novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A tool for RULE Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES. And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if Will gets off that elevator. Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.