I’ll be doing something exciting in the new year — can you believe it’s already time to start thinking about “in the new year”?? — in conjunction with Writespace and Houston High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Writespace and HSPVA are teaming up in January, February, and March to offer a mentoring program for middle school students interested in Creative Writing. At the beginning of each of those months, a professional writer will teach the kids in the program a course on poetry or fiction or playwriting, and then over the course of the next four weeks, those middle school students will be mentored regularly by CW students at HSPVA.

I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am about this! I taught middle school Creative Writing way back in the day for several years, through Writers in the Schools and Johns Hopkins’ Center for Talented Youth and their Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth, and it will be fun to get back to working with young students again.

I’ll be teaching the Poetry course on January 8th and the Fiction course on February 5th, and then my colleague Kathryn Peterson will be teaching Playwriting on March 5th. There will be a reading of the students’ original work at the end of the three-month program.

If you have or know any middle school kids interested in Creative Writing, please do send them our way! These courses will be conducted over Zoom, so location is not as much of an issue. This could make a wonderful holiday or birthday or bar/bat mitzvah gift for a young author-to-be! Space will also be limited, so I recommend signing up earlier rather than later.

Click this link for more details and to register.