The Writing Teachers Collective is a space for classroom teachers, mentors and teaching artists to build community outside of their schools or organizations and grow in their individual practices as writers and educators.

History

The first Writing Teachers Collective in 1999 focused on fostering the continued growth of teachers who write and teach poetry. From this space, about 30 people met and shared best practices including workshops and brainstorming which later sparked the idea for the city-wide poetry festival.

Description

By coming together to share, vent and celebrate, as well as invest in our own writing & teaching practices, we can continue to build a better world for the young people of Chicago. Each session invites a guest artist, writer or educator to address new & relevant themes through creative writing and professional development exercises.

The Writing Teachers Collective (WTC) is a community organizing tool and an emergent strategy, growing at the speed of trust. WTC welcomes all educators and allies to Chicago’s youth and strives to be responsive to the needs & desires of the community that we build with one another.

As attendees & facilitators, we’ve had:

poets & writers who taught or want to teach
teachers who write or want to write
administrators who want to integrate creative writing into new and burdensome state standards
community arts organizers engaging youth

Workshops are hosted by YCA’s Education Manager, Robin Reid Drake and are led by different facilitators; check our calendar for further info.

Join us for monthly sessions curated by & for EDUCATORS. Come sharpen your tools on arts education, creative writing curriculum and much more. PD credit is now available. Contact robinreid@youngchicagoauthors.org with your questions or requests for further information.

Upcoming facilitators:

12/14/24

Teachers Guide to R&R + Collaborative Poetry

This workshop focuses on collaborative writing & coaching students through “group pieces.” Participants will try out several methods of collaborative writing and leave this workshop prepared to walk into festival season with confidence. Non-Rooted & Radical attendees are of course welcome to come get collaborative too!

Christie Valentin-Bati (she/her) is a suburban kid from Florida now mostly grown up with an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College. She is an interdisciplinary poet and photographer writing in the lineage of Black women writers declaring radical truth/love through unflinching self-expression like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Lucille Clifton. Her creative work and pedagogy emphasizes the quotidian as the bulk of life resides in the ordinary. Beyond the mundane, her work explores ecology and gender, and hybridity and genre-defying forms which includes combining text with visual art, collage, and photography. Her work has received honorable mention in the 2022 and 2021 Academy of American Poet’s Poetry Contest, has been commissioned by the ACLU of Illinois, and exhibited in Porous Gallery and Davis Street Drawing Room. She is published in Allium Journal, Bending Genres, and Menacing Hedge among others.

Robin Reid Drake is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary poet, filmmaker, and educator originally from Greensboro, North Carolina. Their writing has been published in Foglifter, DREGINALD, UnderStory Quarterly, and Poetry Magazine, among others. They have received fellowships and residencies from the Ragdale Foundation, the Elsewhere Living Arts Museum, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Drake currently works as an Education Manager for Young Chicago Authors and as a Part Time Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they received their MFA.

Previous Facilitators:

11/9/24

Student Mental Health & Creative Mentorship

How can I be more responsive to the needs of my students mental health in my poetry classroom? This workshop invites conversation around the realities of mental health in today’s student population, with a focus on depression and anxiety, and how it impacts and is impacted by our roles as creative mentors.

10/19/24

Brave Poetry Communities in Schools

Writing Teachers Collective is back with another workshop from our line up of Fall Teacher Support Sessions! This month, we pose the question, how have things like the pandemic, social media & changing mental health landscapes affected our students’ capacities to earnestly pursue their passions in our schools? Facilitated by YCA’s Education Manager, Robin Reid Drake, this workshop explores ways to make our schools and classrooms safer places for poetry to thrive.

9/21/24

Ritual, Relationship & Creative Writing in the Classroom

How do you fight for creativity to thrive in your classroom? Poetry holds a unique place in the traditional English class; a sort of detour away from the rubrics of correct or incorrect, good or bad. Poetry asks its makers and its audiences to be free— to make huge leaps, to experiment, to fail and feel the joy of failure in the process of fumbling toward something new. As teachers we know this kind of freedom is rarely supported by the systems we must work under. In this workshop YCA Education Manager, Robin Reid Drake will guide participants through reading, reflection and creative exercises to explore how we might steward genuine creative practices in our classrooms for the year ahead.

8/10/24

WTC Picnic In the Park is an invitation to the entire Writing Teachers Collective community to come together to eat, enjoy the remaining days of summer and engage in a generative writing workshop and reflective conversation about our experiences, needs and aspirations as teachers for the year to come. WTC holds space for writing teachers of all kinds throughout the school year and this relaxing final session to our Summer Series is an opportunity to remind each other of the solidarity we are capable of even when caught in the rush of the school year.

Chima “Naira” Ikoro (she/they) is an interdisciplinary writer and first-generation Nigerian from the South Side of Chicago. Naira is currently a teaching artist at Young Chicago Authors, where she spent many of her formative years as a student. Through programs such as Check The Method, Wordplay, and YCA’s internship formerly known as Bomb Squad, the city’s artist community has always been her home. She created the Community Organizing beat at South Side Weekly, and is currently The Weekly’s Community Builder, where she started The Exchange, The Weekly’s poetry corner. She received her bachelor’s in Film with a minor in Environmental Studies from Columbia College Chicago. Alongside her friends, Naira co-founded a mutual aid abolitionist collective called Blck Rising, and she continues to root all her work in caring for and connecting to the communities she belongs to.

Robin Reid Drake is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary poet, filmmaker, and educator originally from Greensboro, North Carolina. Their writing has been published in Foglifter, DREGINALD, UnderStory Quarterly, and Poetry Magazine, among others. They have received fellowships and residencies from the Ragdale Foundation, the Elsewhere Living Arts Museum, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Drake currently teaches in Chicago Public Schools through Young Chicago Authors. They have taught across the country for organizations such as Hugo House (Seattle, WA) and Pendle Hill (Philadelphia, PA) and also the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they received their MFA.

7/13/24

This summer, WTC invites writing educators to build community by activating three different locations around Chicago with their poetry and pedagogy.

Our July session invites attendees to participate in a generative, interdisciplinary poetry workshop facilitate by the one and only E’mon Lauren. “Ekphrastics & Portraiture” will have attendees engage and respond to the exhibition “Images on Which to Build,” on display at the Cultural Center’s Michigan Avenue Galleries. After experiencing & discussing the exhibit, participants will produce their own ekphrastic self-portrait, a poetic self portrait which responds to a work of art in the exhibit.

E’mon Lauren was named Chicago’s first Youth Poet Laureate. Her work unpacks her coined philosophy of “hood-womanism.” She is an artist and educator from the Wes and Souf side of Chicago and has been featured in Vogue Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and The Chicago Tribune. Her work has appeared in the BreakBeat Poets Anthology series, Volumes 1 & 2, Poetry Magazine, The Reader, South Side Weekly and elsewhere. She is host of her hit talk show, “The Real Hoodwives of Chicago’’, produced by her production company, BlkHoneyBun Productions, LLC. Her first chapbook of poems, ”COMMANDO,” was published by Haymarket Books.

Images on which to build, 1970s-1990s presents a range of photographic practices that used the medium as a tool for collectivity and empowerment within interconnected lesbian, trans, and queer grassroots organizing. This exhibition reveals the technologies through which influential image cultures were constructed and circulated. The exhibition presents a range of photographic practices to explore the process of learning within alternative schools, workshops, demonstrations, dance clubs, slideshow presentations, correspondences, and community-based archive projects.

6/15/24

Kuumba Lynx co-founders, Jacinda Bullie & Jaquanda Saulter, along with a cohort of Kuumba Lynx Youth Poets, kick off the Writing Teachers Collective Summer Series by guiding participants through a writing workshop that activates The Poetry Making Playground.

The Poetry Making Playground is an immersive creative installation where original poems, written by some of Chicago’s most renowned poets, have been reimagined and physicalized for audiences to interact with in an entirely new way! The poetry playground fuses poetics, tangible objects, illustration, fabrications/design, multimedia, life size interactive and reflective installations for everyone! It will include up to 7 interactive works inviting one to Tap -Tap into our radical imagination and engage our ancestral geometries, sacred syllable inheritance, metaphorical joys, genetic word wisdoms and righteous rhymes.

5/18/24

Christian Aldana‘s poetry is a safe space for wicked and sinister femmes who hate imperialism. She is the author of The Water We Swim In, a full length collection of poetry published by Sampaguita Press in 2023. They are a queer, Filipinx, artist, educator and community organizer based in Chicago. Though she has a soft spot for the Midwest, part of her will always be in South East Asia (Cebu and Saigon) where she grew up.

She is the founder and Creative Director of Luya, a poetry organization that centers the stories and experiences of people of color. Alongside their comrades at The Digital Sala, Christian is dreaming up alternative visions of what radically flexible, community-centered, revolutionary writing spaces can be.

Their poetry has been published or is forthcoming in the Chicago Reader, Injustice Watch, Marias at Sampaguitas, the Capilano Review, and Locked Horn Press. Their performances have been featured at the Poetry Foundation, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Stony Island Arts Bank, Young Chicago Authors, on NPR’s Worldview, and more.

When they’re not writing poems you can find them in deep discussion about dystopian sci fi, cooking in their pjs, and trying to throw off the tether of scheduled time.

5/4/24

Madeline Kobayashi

Madeline “Desi” Kobayashi (she/her) is an educator, writer, instructional coach, curriculum designer, and professional development specialist. She earned her Bachelors in Secondary Education/History from DePaul University, and spent 14 years as a classroom teacher, for which she received the 2014 Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her extensive teaching experience includes middle and high school Social Science, English Language Arts, and College and Career Readiness, serving youth in four schools across Chicago. She has also worked as a literacy specialist with the Chicago Public Schools Department of Literacy, as well as an instructional coach for Rogers Elementary School. She holds two Masters Degrees in Secondary Education/English Language Arts, and Literacy Education with a Reading Specialist endorsement. She is currently a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and her research interests include liberatory literacies, abolitionist teaching, and trauma-responsive pedagogies. She is passionate about building collaborative spaces for educators, and designing research-based literacy curricula that is culturally sustaining and attends to the academic and human needs of Black and Latinx youth. Madeline is the co-founder of Critical Learning Collaborative, an education consulting business that supports justice-centered communities of practice in order to transform classrooms into the liberatory spaces our youth need and deserve.

Robin Reid Drake (she/they) writes poetry and short films about whiteness, trans embodiment, horror, ecology and control. They received a 2023 residency at Sundress Academy for the Arts (TN) and were a 2022 Southern Constellations Fellow at the Elsewhere Living Art Museum (NC). Her work can be found in POETRY Magazine, DREGINALD and Foglifter.

They live and teach in Chicago.

Chima “Naira” Ikoro (she/they) is an interdisciplinary writer and first-generation Nigerian from the South Side of Chicago. Naira is currently a teaching artist at Young Chicago Authors, where she spent many of her formative years as a student. Through programs such as Check The Method, Wordplay, and YCA’s internship formerly known as Bomb Squad, the city’s artist community has always been her home. She created the Community Organizing beat at South Side Weekly, and is currently The Weekly’s Community Builder, where she started The Exchange, The Weekly’s poetry corner. She received her bachelor’s in Film with a minor in Environmental Studies from Columbia College Chicago. Alongside her friends, Naira co-founded a mutual aid abolitionist collective called Blck Rising, and she continues to root all her work in caring for and connecting to the communities she belongs to.

Donna “Dante” Marie Gary (she/they) is an African American femme, non binary, and bisexual poet, organizer, and cancer sun. They welcome all pronouns and encourages folks to practice using they/them pronouns with them! They graduated first generation from Whitney M Young and summa cum laude from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Their research focus and concentration was entitled “Poetics of Embodiment; The Ways Marginalized Folks Re-Imagine Their Value.” They acquired a cross school Disability Studies Minor, and made a lasting impression as the co-president of the Disability Student Union. Donna first began sharing her poetry at rallies and marches, then as a youth poet in Louder Than A Bomb and now on stages such as The Metro, NYU Skirball, The Bowery Poetry Club and The Nuyorican Poets Cafe. Their poetry has been published by The Rational Creature, “Dawn With Arms of Roses; A Queer Anthology by Gal Pals Present,” Gordon Square Review, Lacunae: Vassars’ 1st Undergraduate Journal for Queer of Color Critique, Sycamore Review, and BOAAT Press. Her poem “Mouth,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Sycamore Review, and they received admittance to the Tin House Summer Workshop as a Poet Scholar mentored by Samiya Bashir. To reground they enjoy playing chess and drawing with pastels in their hometown Chicago, Illinois.

C. Lofty Bolling (they/them) is a Black nonbinary poet and artist from Virginia. They have been teaching poetry for a few years and have been writing for many more. Relocated to Chicago in 2021, and with new work on the way, you can catch C. Lofty teaching in Bronzeville, drinking too much coffee in coffee shops, and reading Lorraine Hansberry on the train.

Waringa Hunja

Waringa Hunja (she/her) is a graphic designer and writer from Maryland. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Waringa is currently the Teen Programs Instructor at 826CHI; when she’s not there, she splits her time between freelance design work and a frantic, never-ending hunt for the best cheesecake in the city.

Timothy David Rey (he/him) is a current two-time recipient of the Changing Worlds/ Artswork Fund ‘Survive and Thrive Grant’, and a 2022 Lambda Literary Fellow for Emerging LGBT+ voices. His work has been published and performed at the Poetry Foundation, Black Horse Review, Obsidian (forthcoming), Sixty Inches from Center, Steppenwolf Theater, and elsewhere. His book of poetry and performance, Little Victories, was published in 2012 by the LGBT imprint, New Town Writes Press.

He is a teaching artist in Chicago and the surrounding areas.

Maya Emma Nnena Ruth Odim (she/they) is a writer and dancer who purposefully mounts performance works in spaces which challenge occidental approaches to performance praxis. Maya is of African American, Igbo and Afro-Cuban lineage, living and working in Chicago, and traveling often. Maya holds a BA in American Studies (Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT) and is an MFA Writing candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) where Maya is specifically studying Igbo Women’s decolonization movements, focusing on the year of 1929. Maya’s self published chapbooks are titled: Places Where We Can Imagine, and Planets, Gourds and Traveling Staffs.

Laura Goldstein‘s (they/them) first collection of poetry, loaded arc, was released by Trembling Pillow Press in 2013 and her second collection, awesome camera was published by Make Now Press in 2014. They have also published several chapbooks with vibrant small presses across the country. They are a Senior Lecturer in Core Literature and Writing at Loyola University Chicago.

blake nemec is a writer, teacher, sound recordist, and health care worker, who lives in Chicago. He is the author of Sharing Plastic, and work supporting abolition, decriminalization of unprotected bodies and musicalities of conversation. Hir work has appeared nationally and internationally in situations such as &NOW, Janus Head, Entitle; Undisciplined Environments, JUPITER 88, SpokenWeb, Captive Genders; Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, or the National Queer Arts Festival. He is a Lambda and SFAI fellow, has long worked as a sound recordist on independent films such as FREE CeCe and is available to facilitate somatics-based writing workshops.

Emerging from a decade-long history of community health clinic and grassroots harm reduction work in the San Francisco Bay Area, blake continues to organize within mutual aid groups and facilitate writing workshops in the Midwest. In the last two years, he has been giving writing workshops which use body based observations to extend techniques within traditional poetry or fiction writing. The trainings support writers’ current creative projects while also being generative. In parallel, the somatic practices in the series can resource artists on a neurological level. blakenemec.net