For the first time, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers will offer a complete writers retreat for educators whose student received recognition in the 2021 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Although last year’s retreat was canceled due to Covid-19, this year we are pleased to send four educators to the Kenyon Review’s Writers Workshop for Teachers Online. The educators will also receive a $200 stipend to support their writing practice during the week-long workshop.
We are excited to announce that Melissa Darcey, Kurt Ostrow, Donna Denizé, and Kirk Schlueter have been selected as the recipients of the 2021 Writers Retreat for Educators.
Meet the Educators
Melissa Darcey
Del Norte High School, San Diego, CA
Melissa Darcey is a high school English teacher who is passionate about instilling a love of writing in students. She also leads a creative writing summer workshop for middle school students and serves as staff adviser of the Del Norte High School newspaper, The Talon, and the high school satire publication, Fowl! As a fiction and nonfiction writer, her work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Louisville Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, Nat. Brut, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere.
Kurt Ostrow
BMC Durfee High School, Fall River, MA
Kurt Ostrow is a public school teacher, unionist, and writer. He runs a queer book club called Reading Rainbow and dreams that educators will soon go on strike for a Green New Deal. His work has been published in Rethinking Schools and by Boston’s NPR. He will be attending the MFA program at The Ohio State University in fall 2021.
Donna Denizé
St. Albans School for Boys, Washington, D.C.
Of Haitian American descent, Donna Denizé holds degrees from Stonehill College and Howard University, where she was a student of poet Robert Hayden, while he served as Consultant to the Library of Congress. She has contributed to scholarly books and journals, including Shakespeare Set Free, published by the Folger Shakespeare Library, and English Journal. She is the author of a chapbook, The Lover’s Voice (1997), and a book, Broken Like Job (2005). Her poems have appeared in magazines and journals, such as Provincetown Arts, Gargoyle, World Order, and Innisfree Poetry Journal.
Kirk Schlueter
Edwardsville High School, Edwardsville, IL
Kirk Schlueter received his MFA in Poetry from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, where he was a Master’s Fellow and was awarded the 2017 Outstanding Graduate Thesis. His poetry has been recognized with an Illinois Arts Council Award, received the 2018 Frontier Award for New Poets, and has twice been a finalist for the Jake Adam York Book Prize. Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in River Styx, Nimrod, RHINO, Bat City Review, Grist, The Pinch, Passages North, Ninth Letter, Natural Bridge, and elsewhere. He coaches English and teaches tennis (he knows what he said) in St. Louis’s Illinois suburbs.
If the opportunity to spend a full week focusing on your writing and interacting with other educators and writers sounds exciting to you, stay tuned to our blog for information about next year’s Writers Retreat for Educators!
About the Dr. Ernest B. Fleishman Educators’ Fund
The Dr. Ernest B. Fleishman Educators’ Fund helps allow the Alliance to provide recognition, professional-development opportunities, and classroom materials to educators whose students excel in the Awards, especially those from under-resourced communities. The fund was formed in recognition of Dr. Ernest B. Fleishman, a champion of educators, long-time member of the Alliance’s Board of Directors, and former senior executive at Scholastic Inc.
Featured image: Images of the selected Writers Retreat participants (from left): Melissa Darcey, Kurt Ostrow, Donna Denizé, and Kirk Schlueter. All images provided by the participants.