The Authority Project
Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom is being used in graduate courses and is available in more than 300 libraries. See reviews in Pedagogy (2007: volume 7, issue 1) and College English (2009: volume 71, issue 3).
Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom welcomes a variety of voices and perspectives as it explores who has which rights in creative and academic processes, how ideas and individuals are privileged, who has permission or control in classrooms, and how all of this is in flux in the hundreds of creative writing programs that now exist. Contributors include Nancy Kuhl, Brent Royster, Katharine Haake, Wendy Bishop, Susan Hubbard, Cathy Day, Mary Swander, and others.
This collection of full-bodied, tough-minded essays rocks. Tepid, they're not, asserting authority while questioning the very assertion of authority. The authors take care of business and, in doing so, take care to illuminate the delicate balance of power found at the fulcrum of the creative writing classroom. An authentic achievement.
–Michael Martone, author of Double-Wide
Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom, edited by Anna Leahy, serves as a fine example of this expanding, improving conversation on the teaching of creative writing. In just over two hundred pages, seventeen creative writing teachers weigh in on subjects from the familiar (portfolio systems, self-obsessed students, and low expectations) to the exotic (for instance, using myth to guide a workshop and teaching what you do not know as a pedagogical strategy). […T]here is intuitive, original thinking in just about every essay. The collection initiates an important conversation about the role of authority in the creative writing classroom. Overall, Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom is generative, ranging, and substantial. It is a book I wish I had read before I taught my first creative writing workshop.
–Eric Burger in a roundtable review in Pedagogy
