Visiting Writers
 |
| Michael London introduces the Genoa students' plays before they perform at Otterbein. |
Throughout the spring, creative writing and acting students from Otterbein joined Dayton playwright Michael London in teaching Genoa Middle School students how to recognize and capture tales from their own experiences and translate those stories into theatrical productions to be performed for the community in May.
London directed several creative writing workshops with two Genoa Middle School language arts classes. Otterbein students acted as apprentices and coaches both with London and on their own, helping the young teens discover anecdotes and compelling story details that make for good stage drama.
The Genoa Middle students then performed their work as part of the Genoa-Otterbein Creative Literacy Alliance Celebration on May 9th in the Otterbein Campus Center Pit Theater.
London has been an artist with the Ohio Arts Council, Arts In Education Program for twenty years. His work "Smile" has been performed in the United States, Canada and Great Britain. He operates a theater company in Dayton and is a novelist.
Read the original press release here.
 |
| Helen Frost works with a Westerville City School teacher at the CLA Summer Institute. |
Poet Helen Frost
Poet Helen Frost first visited Otterbein in June 2006 as the Keynote Speaker and workshop leader for the Summer Institute on Creative Literacy. There, she shared her expertise for teaching creative writing in schools and her particular knowlede, based on years of experience, of helping young people write about difficult subjects.
Helen then returned in the fall, serving as poet-in-residence at Genoa Middle School and visiting writer at Otterbein, where she continued to help teachers develop strategies for using creative literacy in the classroom and across the curriculum. She also met with Genoa students, leaading them in exercises, and with Otterbein students, guiding their instruction on teaching creative writing. Her residency ended with a public reading at Otterbein from her new novel-in-poems, The Braid.
Helen Frost holds a Bachelor's degree in Elementary Education with a concentration in English from Syracuse University and a Master's degree in English from Indiana University. She has published poetry, children's books, anthologies, and a play, as well as a book about teaching writing. She has taught writing at all levels, from pre-school through university, in the United States and Scotland.
In Fort Wayne, Helen taught at the YWCA and the Fort Wayne Youtheatre to help high school students write about how they had been affected by violence. Their writing was the basis of a play and an anthology of student writing, both titled Why Darkness Seems So Light. That work led to the book, When I Whisper, Nobody Listens: Helping Young People Write About Difficult Issues (Heinemann, 2001). She has won many awards and prizes for her work, including the Women Poets Series Competition of 1993, the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award, the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America and the Michael L. Printz Honor. Another novel-in-poems for children and young adults, Diamond Willow, is forthcoming in 2008.
Back to Creative Literary Alliance home
