Index

Experiments in Reflection: A Conversation with Leticia Britos Cavagnaro

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Today we visit with Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, author of Experiments in Reflection. Leticia is a developmental biologist turned design educator, who has been a part of Stanford University’s d.school since 2006. She co-founded and co-directs the University Innovation Fellows program, impacting students and educators worldwide. Leticia’s work integrates emerging technologies in creative methods to foster self-directed and responsible future shapers.

Frank Murphy: Why I Write

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I remember the first book I ever made—out of cardboard, tape, and cut-out pictures from the sports page of the Philadelphia Bulletin. I wrote and constructed my own little sports book about Boston Celtics great John Havilcek retiring. (Sacrilegious, I know, because I’ve always been a Philadelphia 76ers fan. But I just loved watching Havilcek play!) It was April 1978 and I was 11 years old. And, man, do I wish I still had that little book!

About 12 years later, all grown up, I found myself teaching second grade. I noticed that there weren’t many children’s books about famous historical women. So I started making my own little books for my students to read in class. I wrote a little book about Vinnie Ream, a 17-year-old girl who sculpted Abraham Lincoln from life, and Sophonisba Anguissola, a female Renaissance painter who introduced emotion into portraiture. Then I created a little story about Ben Franklin making these little mathematical magic squares. It didn’t take long for me to send some of these stories out as manuscripts to publishers. After six years of toiling and working and honing my skills (and many, many rejection letters) I, f-i-n-a-l-l-y, received a contract from Random House for the Ben Franklin story.

All of the stories I have written have been created with an intention of “breathing life” into history. From the start, I wanted to excite young readers about famous people in history, but not necessarily focus on dates and names and places. I wanted kids to think history was cool. I wanted my stories to have something interesting, maybe centering on a little-known tidbit or story about these icons from history. From Ben Franklin’s magic squares, to a lost dog that George Washington found, to a story I’m polishing about Frederick Douglass and his impact on the origin of Black History Month, I hope my stories inspire young readers to fall in love with history!

That’s why I write! I want to “breathe life” into history! I want young readers (and older, too) to read my books and walk away excited to read more about these icons. And, maybe, chase history themselves and look for and find new stories about their own favorite historical icons.

Grant Faulkner: Why I Write

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When I was a young boy, I remember going grocery shopping with my mother, and if she lost track of me in the store, she’d inevitably find me in the aisle that carried pens and notebooks. I had a strange fascination—perhaps even a fetish—for stationery, pens, and journals. When I visited my father’s office, I’d sneak away with a treasure trove of pads of papers and pens. I asked for a leather-bound diary with a lock on it for my 7th birthday. Soon afterward, my mother gave me an antique rolltop desk designed for a child, and I was in heaven. I felt like a real writer, and I wrote my first story at that desk.

This is all to say that when I think about the myriad of things that made me a writer and made writing such an urgent act, I sometimes think it was pre-determined. I felt the calling to write from as early as I can remember. I took a few steps in different directions here and there over the years, but I knew that no matter my profession, writing would always be a strong gravitational force in my life.

But that primal calling doesn’t tell me “the why” of it all. Why spend so many hours—why spend the better part of an entire lifetime—in this activity that doesn’t generally offer much societal approbation, and certainly not much money?

I once told a friend that there were at least 100 good reasons why I wrote. But after I said that, I wondered if I was exaggerating. It turns out I wasn’t.

Here’s why I write.

  1. I write to see the beginning and the end of it all.
  2. I write to find myself.
  3. I write to lose myself.
  4. I write to tame reality.
  5. I write to augment reality.
  6. I write to discover how to survive.
  7. I write to think about how to die.
  8. I write to shape my ideas with words.
  9. I write to see the world through others’ eyes.
  10. I write to exult the possible.
  11. I write to probe the chaos in myself.
  12. I write to better define the clarity of myself.
  13. I write to touch a dragon’s scales.
  14. I write to live in a wizard’s magic.
  15. I write to make the world bigger.
  16. I write to make the world smaller.
  17. I write to demystify people’s differences.
  18. I write to see with fresh eyes.
  19. I write to reorder and recombine the world.
  20. I write to listen to the heartbeat of the monstrous.
  21. I write to break open the locked chambers of myself.
  22. I write to enliven feelings that have become numb.
  23. I write to hear a tree’s whispers.
  24. I write to make the obvious strange (and the strange obvious)
  25. I write to trace the contours of nuances.
  26. I write to push the boundaries of myself.
  27. I write because I don’t know what else to do.
  28. I write to be a part of the world.
  29. I write to invent myself.
  30. I write to preserve myself.
  31. I write to change the world.
  32. I write to explore my darkness.
  33. I write to inhabit my lightness.
  34. I write to hold onto ephemeral moments.
  35. I write to quarrel with myself.
  36. I write to travel to other lands.
  37. I write to encounter the unknown.
  38. I write to live in the past and the future.
  39. I write to eavesdrop on others’ conversations.
  40. I write to peek through the keyholes of forbidden rooms.
  41. I write to find an antidote to my malaise.
  42. I write to nourish my spirit.
  43. I write to test my values.
  44. I write to read the world.
  45. I write because with each word, new expanses open.
  46. I write so that my life will not end when I die.
  47. I write to not die of the truth.
  48. I write to maintain my equilibrium.
  49. I write to be seduced by all of the strange and wonderful possibilities of language.
  50. I write to be vulnerable.
  51. I write to share.
  52. I write to find beauty in the gritty aspects of life and grittiness in the beautiful.
  53. I write to entertain myself.
  54. I write to converse with others.
  55. I write to hide from others.
  56. I write because there are so many voices in my head.
  57. I write to give.
  58. I write because I only have one life, and I want so many more.
  59. I write to get revenge (sorry).
  60. I write to find out why.
  61. I write to resist anything that threatens me.
  62. I write to pursue the things I can never quite know.
  63. I write to know the boundaries of my fears.
  64. I write to not be lonely.
  65. I write to feel solace.
  66. I write to to fortify my resilience.
  67. I write to mend.
  68. I write to feel whole.
  69. I write to know what makes bad people good and good people bad.
  70. I write to hear the music of life.
  71. I write to better enjoy my morning cup of coffee.
  72. I write to better enjoy my evening glass of wine.
  73. I write to develop a rapt eye–and then express the raptures I see.
  74. I write to appreciate others’ words and stories more.
  75. I write to experiment, to fail, and to try again.
  76. I write to pause.
  77. I write to notice.
  78. I write because words open a secret door through which all else flows.
  79. I write to talk to myself.
  80. I write to feel the immensity of it all.
  81. I write to pray.
  82. I write to rewrite.
  83. I write because there’s no way to get it right.
  84. I write so that I can buy fine journals and pens.
  85. I write to retort.
  86. I write to hear the silence.
  87. I write because I’m not satisfied with just living.
  88. I write to wend through the contortions of all of my doubts.
  89. I write to know all of the different homes where I have lived.
  90. I write to not feel misunderstood.
  91. I write to feel the awe of all of the scents, sights, sounds, touches, and tastes of the world.
  92. I write to be more intimate with myself.
  93. I write to hear what gods and devils talk about.
  94. I write to speak in tongues.
  95. I write to know the things that are hidden.
  96. I write to remember.
  97. I write because, as Gloria Steinem said, “Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.”
  98. I write because I don’t know how not to write.
  99. I write to find hope in suffering.
  100. I write to light candles in the darkness. I write to keep going, so I’ll add just one more.
  101. I write to love.

I just sent my friend these 100 reasons and told her I think I can come up with 100 more.

Why I Write: Marissa Moss on Bringing the Story Back into History

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Most students think of history as a boring list of names and dates, a series of wars, treaties, and political events. Many textbooks introduce history in just this way, serving up events as themes. It’s no wonder readers aren’t inspired.

History is so much more than the dates a particular king reigned or the spread of a particular technology. It’s the story of all of us throughout time. Studying history should be like having an adventure in another time and place.

One reason I write historical fiction and biographies is because I want kids to see how exciting real history is. Textbooks may be boring, but going right to original source material rarely is. When I wrote the diary of a pioneer girl taking the Oregon Trail in 1850, I read stacks of pioneer journals, some published, some not. I felt like I was looking over the writers’ shoulders, fording rivers alongside them. The result, Rachel’s Journal, is meant to give students the same thrill I got, the same sense of being close to an experience that happened in a completely different era.

The Oregon Trail or the American Revolution are obvious subjects. Every student learns about them, but few are excited by them, despite each having a history that’s truly riveting if only it were told like a great story. This is what writers owe readers, what teachers owe students—a sense of the story that tells the history.

One way to grab students is to tell them tales they don’t know about, giving them that wonderful sense of discovery. I love stumbling on little-known stories that grab both my imagination and sense of history. Those are the stories I turn into books, the tales of courage and achievement against the odds that deserve to be widely known. These are the kind of stories kids can really care about.

Maggie Gee was that kind of lucky discovery. I found her in a local newspaper article about WWII veterans, published, naturally, on Veteran’s Day. I didn’t know that women had flown warplanes in WWII and it seemed like an important story for kids (and adults) to know about.

I looked Maggie up in the phone book, called her and asked for an interview. That interview and the many conversations that followed became Sky High: The True Story of Maggie Gee. What impressed me about Maggie was her drive, her optimism, her courage. Sure, there was discrimination against her, both as a woman, and as a Chinese-American, but she barely mentioned such problems when she talked about her life. Although her mother had lost her U.S. citizenship when she married Maggie’s father, a Chinese immigrant, that didn’t deter her from working as a welder on Liberty ships during the war, nor from encouraging her daughter to join the Women’s Army Service Pilots. After the WASP were disbanded, Maggie went on to charge through more doors, becoming a physicist and working on weapon systems at the Lawrence Livermore labs, another job that was rare for a woman, let alone an Asian-American woman.

Since Sky High came out, Maggie, the illustrator, Carl Angel, and I have done many school visits, presenting both the book and the subject of the book, a rare event. The students are always inspired by Maggie, her infectious optimism, her advice to ignore barriers and focus instead on opportunities. Meeting Maggie is like meeting living history in the shape of your grandmother. She shows the kids that anyone can make history. At one poor school in Oakland, a boy was so moved by Maggie, he asked her to sign his most prized possession, his soccer ball.

I thought of Maggie’s grit, her enthusiasm for taking risks and following her dreams, when I started looking for a Civil War story. I wanted to find a woman who had made similar daring choices, but I wasn’t sure where to look. So I read widely, about both the North and the South. I learned that more than 400 women had disguised themselves as men and fought as soldiers for one side or the other. Could one of those women’s lives hold the story I wanted?

I plowed through books about nurses, soldiers, spies, but they all lacked some essential characteristic. Some were there to be with a husband, brother, father, or fiancé. Some were adventurous, but not particularly patriotic or admirable. Very few cared about the issue of slavery.

Sorting through all these women, I found one that seemed promising. The first book I read about her didn’t tell me much, but it gave me enough of a sense that I wanted to learn more. When I saw she’d written her own memoir of her soldiering life, that I could hear in her own voice her motives and intentions, it was like finding a treasure trove. Again, that magic “aha” moment of discovery!

That woman was Sara Emma Edmonds, a.k.a. Frank Thompson. She was everything I’d hoped for—she had integrity, bravery, and loyalty to the Union. As a bonus, she wrote movingly about the horrors and wrongs of slavery. But there was more: Edmonds was the only woman to successfully petition the government after the war for status as a veteran. She wanted her charge of desertion changed to an honorable discharge, and she wanted a pension for her years of service. Suffering from malaria she’d caught in the Virginia peninsula campaign early in the war, she needed medical care she couldn’t afford without it.

It took several years and two separate acts of Congress, but Edmonds received the legal recognition she so richly deserved. Men she’d served with testified on her behalf, praising her steadiness under fire, her work as a battlefield nurse, a general’s adjutant, a postmaster, and even a spy.

Her’s was a great story, a vast canvas that covered many of the pivotal battles of the war. Now that I’d found my subject, I had to shape this big life into a book—and a short book at that. I first wrote about Sara Emma Edmonds for a picture book, choosing to showcase her first spy mission, one emblematic event to stand for such a complicated life. That text became Nurse, Soldier, Spy, beautifully illustrated by John Hendrix, and published April 2017 by Abrams.

Though the subject is complicated, students find the story compelling. It makes them think and ask questions. Why would a woman need to dress as a man to serve in the army? Why would you choose to fight in the Civil War? What did it mean to be a spy in those days? And that’s how you learn history, by asking just these kinds of questions.

A picture book like this makes history accessible to younger children, but as pleased as I was with the picture book, there was so much more to say about Sara than could fit in that constrained format. I went on to write a middle-grade novel, with the luxury of chapter upon chapter to unfold the many facets of Sara. I could show her tenderness as a nurse, her bravery as a postmaster on lonely roads known for ambushes, her fierce loyalty to her fellow-soldiers in battle, her quick-thinking as a spy. And I could show the loneliness and stress that her disguise cost her, the burden of living a lie on a deeply ethical and honest person.

Sara had to dress as a man to serve the country she loved. Maggie could enlist, but had her opportunities curbed because she was a woman. Women in the military today aren’t officially allowed “in combat,” but since they’re in active combat zones, they face the same risks as the men without the same possibilities for promotion and recognition. One-hundred-and-fifty years after the Civil War, women are still living little-known stories that we’ll only learn about later. They are truly history in the making. Someday we’ll read about how courageous and capable they’ve been in Afghanistan and Iraq, as they’ve always been, whenever they’ve been given the chance or secretly taken it.

Andy Myer: Why I Write

Cartoon illustration by Andy Myer of himself with a pencil coming out of his head, bending at a right angle down, and writing out "Why I Write!?!"

Why do I write? Hmmm. Give me just a minute….

OK, I guess I’ll start with one of the few sharp memories I had as a child. I sat at our kitchen table with my younger brother and my parents while my father jotted something on a notepad. As hilariously mundane as it seems now, I was struck with a kind of amazement that his fingers held this little plastic stick, and words were pouring out out of the point onto the paper. The connection between the hand and the pen, and the act of writing itself seemed somehow magical. The fact that he may have been jotting down “Oil change, call Murray, pick up dry cleaning” wouldn’t have spoiled the moment in the least.

My father was a word aficionado. Sadly, the words he loved most were from 17th century England, which made his own writing more or less unreadable. In his view of style, why use the word “fancy” when you have “crinkum-crankum,” “soldier” when you have “man-at-arms, or “Wow!” when you have “Zounds!”

However, his devotion to language wasn’t always a bad thing. On long road trips we’d often play an unnamed describing game to pass the time. Dad would suggest some random object, say “bicycle,” or “giraffe” or “pyramid,” and my assignment was to define the thing as clearly as I could to someone who didn’t know what it was. As a car game it never gained much traction outside our own Ford LTD, but I found it fun nonetheless.

My impulse to write is deeply connected to humor, which was my survival drug of choice during my adolescence. While my peeps toyed with cigarettes, alcohol or weed to salve their hormone-induced angst, I was zoning out on the collected works of Robert Benchley, James Thurber, and Jean Shepherd, the recordings of Alan Sherman, Tom Lehrer and Jonathan Winters, the cartoons of Walt Kelly, Charles Schultz, Ronald Searle, and…..well, you get the idea.

My attachment to humor was in large part due to the endorphin-inducing pleasure I took in laughing. But it was far more elemental than that. It began for me as a deeply consoling way to confront reality, which I found then, and increasingly find now, so demoralizing, threatening, chaotic, and absurd. Humor gave me release in unexpected puns, offered solace in shared catastrophe, transmuted the frailties and tragedies of human existence into something I could bear more easily.

The tools and timing of humor were cemented into the metamorphic rock of my personality long ago, and now writing offers me a way to explore them, play with them. I often have the experience of smiling, even laughing out loud at some unexpected thought when I’m tapping away at my computer alone. It’s possible this behavior is diagnosed somewhere in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but I’m perfectly OK with that.

Over time my writing has taken on distinctly unhumorous roles—book reviews, political commentary, corporate communications, eulogies, wedding toasts, feature articles for trade publications, and more recently, the gaping maw of social media. But the challenge and joy of finding the phrase that most elegantly expresses a thought or emotion is one of the great free pleasures in my life, nearly equal to watching YouTube Fail videos of people slipping on ice.

My assignment, when I choose to accept it, is to find elegance whenever I place words next to each other. I don’t mean elegance in a highfalutin sort of way. I’m talking about the exquisite and elusive spot where simplicity meets beauty. I’d like to think I have my moments of success. Here’s one I’d choose, from my current project Hugh Manatee’s Last Stand, an enviro-political dystopian satire.

“Gideon Manatee was a tall man, but he’d gone to pot over the years, and had a belly that entered a room a solid two seconds before the rest of him. His leather belt suffered in a state of perpetual defeat under the overhanging flesh.”

Feel free to disagree, but I liked this paragraph when it first came to me, and it pleases me all these months later, which is exactly my point.

My enthusiasm for gluing words together well isn’t limited to some ambitious work I have underway. I take as much gratification composing an angry e-mail to my dolt of a congressman as I do composing my next masterwork (which I guess would be my first masterwork). I’ll occasionally return to my sent e-mail folder just to gloat over how pithy and exquisitely expressive one of my messages was.

However, there are far more consequential reasons why I write. I can think of half a dozen right off the bat — my six glorious grandchildren. They all live close by, a situation which is a constant source of wonderment and existential gratitude. Yet for all the joy my wife and I take at their presence in our lives, dark thunderclouds of foreboding for them haunt me in the wee hours of the night.

The imperfect but robust country of my youth is unravelling surprisingly quickly, and the imperishable planet I grew up on is literally melting away, both in real time. My writing is often now an act of defiance, of wavering but fervent hope, and love. Whatever teeny consequence my words might have in putting off the gathering pandemonium, I can at least look my grandkids in their eyes without offering an inner apology to them.

Beyond that, I suppose I write for the same reasons people make movies, dance, sing, compose, act, paint, play violin, or take photographs. It’s my way of experiencing the world deeply, making as much sense of it as best I can, adding as much imagination, humor, eloquence and passion to my understanding as I can manage, and sharing whatever comes out the other end with anyone who’s interested.

Isn’t that’s what nearly every artist aspires to do, one way or another?

Walking Toward the Sun: Kim Culbertson, Why I Write

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Writers grow weary for many reasons.

Writing can be a lonely undertaking (maybe I’ll just check out Facebook one more time?), the blank page can feel like a gaping, intimidating cave (that sock drawer won’t organize itself, wanders off), and in today’s age of social media the balance of the private act of writing and the public image of what it means to be writing (#amwriting) can often feel discouraging. Some days, returning to the work, to that blank page, with all the exterior noise humming in our minds is too daunting. And for those seeking publication, the options and challenges appear endless. Should I try to get an agent? Should I publish independently through a small house, a hybrid, on my own? Should I try a different genre? Should I start with short stories or nonfiction articles or head straight to that novel? We start Googling, “Am I too old to go to dentist school?”

And, yet, we write. We write.

The other day, I was speaking with a writer who has been trying to get an agent for years. “It is killing my writing.” All that seeking, she meant. All that comparison to other writers. For those of us who have an agent, who might or might not have a few books in the world, this seeking doesn’t end — it changes shape. Comparisons still tap relentlessly at us. At the time of year all the “best of” lists come out you cross your fingers but, yep, your book isn’t on any of them again. Another writer you know has been asked to be on the guest faculty at a cool retreat. All these other writers are at conventions, on panels, smiling into a sea of school children with their shiny book held aloft like baby Simba in The Lion King. Everyone seems to be paying attention to the same few books over and over. All this comparison, all this otherness, stacks up on writers; we can’t help but worry: are those other writers just doing it better? Or worse: What am I doing wrong? No matter where you are in the process of your writing—whether it is a hobby or a career or an I-don’t-actually-know-what-the-heck-I’m-doing sort of scenario, the sea of comparison and public-literary-life-seeking can be agonizing.

Wait, so—what does any of this have to do with walking toward the sun?

Sitting in yoga the other day, my teacher talked to us while we, eyes (gently) closed, sat on our mats in the dim light of the studio. Over the years, my yoga teachers have said many beautiful things I have applied to my writing, but this time, this particular teacher said something specific that jolted an almost electric current through me. She told us that in yoga the goal is not to achieve something; in yoga we simply ‘practice walking toward the sun’. Sitting there on my mat, with the low chiming music ebbing around me, her words echoed: practice walking toward the sun.

It’s no secret I’m a fan of metaphor (see: anything I’ve ever written). And I have long loved the parallel of writing and yoga as a practice, as something we do again and again as a way of bringing meaning and stillness to our lives, as a way of noticing our bodies in the world. Because writing has always done this for me, this honing of awareness through the shaping of sentences, through the study of character, through the intricate (or sometimes sloppy) assembling of a plot arc. When I manage to block out the exterior world of writing and publishing, I find that each time I return to the page, I practice walking toward the sun. I find that warm glow that happens when a sentence comes together on the page, when something that began as a slim wisp of idea in my mind takes shape, becomes a solid form. I close my eyes and tip my chin toward it. I bathe in its warmth.

Turns out, this is why I write.

In addition to publishing, I was a high school teacher for eighteen years and one of the things I love most about writing with teenagers is their buy-in to this idea: that any time we create something new—a story, a poem, a song—we put something into the world that hasn’t been there before and this conjuring of our creativity is a kind of magic. It’s really that simple. This sheer act alone, this putting something singular and new into a world where people mostly “re” (repost, reTweet), matters deeply to me. And I think, if I may be so bold, it matters to us as humans. It generates heat in a world that can feel overwhelmingly cold. Therefore, we must keep practicing, over and over, in whatever form we choose. We must, simply must, keep walking toward the sun.

Janie Chodosh: Why I Write

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The first thing I remember writing was a song for my first-grade teacher — the second thing was a modern retelling of Cinderella (complete with music) for my elementary school. In high school and college, days before email, I wrote letters to everyone I knew — long letters. I passed equally long notes to friends during class, kept journals, and filled notebooks with poems, stories, and reflections. Now, with three published books, I know that I write because I have to.

I do not have a choice.

I write because I am most alive in words and ideas. I write because it is the way to make sense of the world. I love making up new characters, giving them voice, and creating their world. Sometimes I live vicariously. Sometimes I crack myself up. Sometimes I make myself cry. Sometimes I bore myself and then I go read a book — because as much as I love writing, I love reading.

Besides being a writer, I am a naturalist and conservationist. To me, the natural world, like the world of creativity and imagination, is a miracle. I don’t mean miracle in a religious sense, although perhaps that depends on how you define religion, but in the sense of inspiring deep awe. There is magic in everything from a hermit crab to an elephant, just as there is magic in words and images. So what I love to do best is blend these two things.

I write for love, for passion, for mystery, and because I am most myself in the world of nature and the world of words.

Monarch: A Conversation with Poet Heather Bourbeau

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Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish TimesThe Kenyon Review, Meridian, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. She has been featured on KALW and the San Francisco Public Library’s Poem of the Day, and her writings are part of the Special Collections at the James Joyce Library, University College Dublin. Her collection Some Days The Bird is a poetry conversation with the Irish-Australian poet Anne Casey (Beltway Editions, 2022). Her latest collection Monarch is a poetic memoir of overlooked histories from the US West she was raised in (Cornerstone Press, 2023).

Related Resource

Teaching guide for Monarch (PDF)

Getting Schooled On Resistance: a Conversation with Cindy Urbanski

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Through her degree in K-12 Urban Literacy, work with the National Writing Project, her teaching at the 6-12 level as well as the undergraduate and graduate level, Urbanski has witnessed the power shift into the hands of the writer when they are encouraged and trusted to tell their stories with their words.

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The Write Time with Author Jennifer Baker and Educator Lauren Donovan

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Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional of 20 years, the creator/host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, a faculty member of the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction at Bay Path University, and a writing consultant at Baruch College. Formerly a contributing editor to Electric Literature, she received a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship and a Queens Council on the Arts New Work Grant for Nonfiction Literature. Her essay “What We Aren’t (or the Ongoing Divide)” was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2018. In 2019, she was named Publishers Weekly Superstar for her contributions to inclusion and representation in publishing. Jennifer is also the editor of the all PoC-short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018) and the author of the YA novel Forgive Me Not (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2023). She has volunteered with organizations such as We Need Diverse Books and I, Too Arts Collective, and spoken widely on topics of inclusion, the craft of writing/editing, podcasting, and the inner-workings of the publishing industry. Her fiction, nonfiction, and criticism has appeared in various print and online publications.

Lauren Donovan is a teacher in Kansas City, Missouri, and has taught secondary English in both the middle and high school settings for nine years. She is also a student at the University of Kansas in an educational leadership doctorate program. She loves sharing her passion for reading and writing with her students. She enjoys to read and talk about realistic fiction as well as education reform nonfiction.

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