teaching
excursions
” The PSU Vanguard published this about my Urban Humanities class.
I relish how teaching demands both my careful design and my flexibility. I have taught university poetry and writing courses since 1999 at George Mason University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Willamette University, Pacific University, and Portland State University, where I was the resident poet in the Honors College. I have also directed writing centers at St. Mary’s College and Willamette. I team-taught with Michael Glaser a poetry course based in Oxford and Grasmere, England, for three summer terms—2005, 2007, and 2009. I have arranged numerous guest speakers and creative excursions, from touring a homeless encampment to walking neighborhoods in order to read their political histories.
My courses include
Visiting Writer & Artist workshops
I have visited many universities, including Georgetown University Lannan Center for Poetics & Social Practice, University of Alabama MFA in Creative Writing and Book Arts, Cal Arts, and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.
Michael McFadden describes my workshop at Blaffer Art Gallery here“
• Poetry & Politics
• Ecopoetry
• Poetry & the Avant Garde
• The Open Notebook (an experimental writing and art course)
• Activism and the Archives
• Never-Built Portland
Meg Eberle and I founded Vignettes & Verses in 2014, a writing and personal history institute. We offer community courses in memoir writing, journaling and interviewing, as well as poetry practices. We will lead a writing workshop with in County Cork, Ireland this June 2017. We previously brought groups in 2014 and 2016.
Some of my projects combine aspects of my teaching with my poetic practice, whether through audience participation in Remember to Wave and my econ salons, or more explicitly, the writing workshops that comprised the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Project.
A celebration of Lucille Clifton
“
It was the beginning of September. The stars had aligned enough for me to secure a teaching job in a little city on the St. Mary’s River, … [more]”
