New WITS Digital Anthologies!

(from WITS residency period 2008-2009)

Writers in the Schools (WITS) believes in relationships that last. We began working with Grant High School in 1996, and have since grown to serve all of the comprehensive Portland public high schools and five alternative high school programs, serving more than 2,000 students each year with semester-long creative writing residencies, mentoring, and author visits.

To help schools achieve their goal of teaching writing across the disciplines, in 2008-2009 WITS provided residencies in African American Studies, Advanced Biology, Advanced Theatre, Biology, Earth Science, English, English Language Learning, Global Studies, Language Arts, Photography and Spanish for Native Speakers. In order to keep our relationship with schools vital, we are developing new partnerships with other arts organizations and hiring writers with diverse backgrounds.

Each year we publish a print anthology to showcase student work. Our 2008-2009 print anthology, A Whole New Subject, is available at local independent bookstores and on our website http://www.literary-arts.org/wits/anthology.php. We also publish a blog, W.o.o.t.s., to provide even more publishing opportunities for the students we serve.

Our new digital chapbooks, Against the Indigo Sky, Swing Set, and What Now—featuring student poetry, prose, drama and comic arts produced during our 2008-2009 workshops with Portland Public high school students—are our newest way to publish student work. Publication is important because it validates the writer’s effort and enables writers to share their work with readers. The printed page (whether on paper or a computer screen) provides a tangible record of ephemeral work that takes place, primarily, in the imagination.

Read Against the Indigo Sky (or click here to download the full pdf) for a glimpse of life through a teenage lens.  Our next digital chapbook, Swing Set, will be available this spring.

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