Creativity and the Personal Narrative-October 13, 2012

Lacy M. Johnson has a PhD from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. Lacy has taught writing for over a decade in a wide range of classroom situations—from graduate students at top-tier research institutions to women recovering from substance abuse; from teenagers in their first year of college to bilingual second-graders in Houston’s East End. Her creative and critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sentence, TriQuarterly Online, Nimrod, Memoir (and), Gulf Coast, Pebble Lake Review, and Irish Studies Review. Her first book of nonfiction, Trespasses: A Memoir, about class, race, and gender in the rural Midwest, is forthcoming from University of Iowa Press.

Creativity and the Expository Essay-November 10, 2012

Tell students you're about to do expository writing, and you're probably met with groans. The misconceptions about the genre are ingrained in us from the time we're small: expository writing is bo-ring. It's complicated. It's all long-winded, stuffy essays.

Or is it? This workshop will explore ways to expose students to expository writing in all its forms--to let them know that expository writing is a state of mind or a purpose more than it is a form--and to show them how much fun writing to inform, persuade or explain can be. A sample teach will introduce participants to the methods behind this madness, with a Q&A session with concrete resources and lesson ideas to follow.

Autumn Hayes is a freelance writer, creative writing teacher, and Teach for America alumna. She holds a B.S. degree in business administration with a minor in creative writing, graduating cum laude from the University of Southern California. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Defenestration, Southern Women's Review, 7x20, Cuento, Jersey Devil Press, trapeze magazine, and the micro-fiction anthology 140 and Counting. A native Houstonian, she has taught reading, writing, public speaking, math, drama, and vocational welding in Los Angeles, Houston, and the Mississippi Delta.

Writing the Short Story-December 8, 2012

The aim of Writing the Short Story is to provide teachers and writers with exercises and prompts that will encourage students to become comfortable with and confident when composing a fictional narrative.  This hands-on workshop will be a fun way to organize, practice, and write a variety of the tenets of fiction and discover ways to apply these techniques to the classroom and to the STAAR writing assessment.

Melanie Malinowski earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston where she was a recipient of a C. Glenn Cambor Fiction Award, an M.A. in English from the University of New Mexico, where she won a D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, and a B.A. in English from the Pennsylvania State University.  Melanie has taught at WITS since 2000 in various elementary, middle and high schools as well as at M.D. Anderson and Texas Children’s Hospital in the Renal Dialysis Unit, where she is currently in residence.  She also teaches spinning, receiving the title Houston Spinning Instructor of the Year in 2010, and she is the author of an unpublished novel entitled Water Blindness, a haunting elegy to the characters of her youth and the dusky underbelly of her hometown.  A native Delawarean, Melanie now lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Andy, and her seven-year-old daughter, Echo Mariposa, pining for Steven Tyler and counting the days until the next Aerosmith concert.