Description:
Aimed toward graduate student instructors and other creative writing educators, Teaching Cultural Dexterity in Creative Writing offers a formula for important changes in creative writing instruction-especially in literary/creative nonfiction, probing how instruction might become more inclusive and accessible for minoritized/marginalized student-authors. The book chapters use antiracist, trauma-informed, and anticolonial frameworks toward exploring the 21st-century professional, theoretical, and institutional concerns surrounding creative writing practices in North American higher education. As a result, the book explores ways creative writing pedagogies and theories might be adapted for racially and linguistically marginalized (by English) student-authors, who often inhabit minoritized positions within North American colleges and universities.
Applying as a frame the notion of cultural dexterity as it is taught to medical professionals to allow them to engage effectively with patients from all backgrounds, ethnics groups and with all sensitivities, Teaching Cultural Dexterity in Creative Writing examines why and how creative writing instruction needs to be urgently renegotiated. In this essential text for all creative writing instructors, McCray provides all the tools necessary to take positive action with discussions of potential readings, writing prompts and sample course materials.Brief description:
Jen Webb is Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra, Australia. She was the inaugural director of the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, and remains a core member of that Centre.
Her main research interest is the relationship between what Pierre Bourdieu termed 'the field of cultural production'-the broad sphere of creative practice-and the social domain, including the political and sociocultural, the practical and the economic, the local and the global. Her current major projects investigate aspects of creativity, and creative production, and the creative producer, and she has been supported in this by several ARC Discovery projects, the most recent of which is So what do you do? Graduates in the Creative and Cultural Industries (DP160101440). Academics working in the creative field typically have their own creative practice, and Jen's works include lyric and prose poetry, short fictions, and artist books. She is the holder of the inaugural ACT Poet of the Year Award, as well as many other literary awards. She is also the ACT editor for the Australian Book Review's States of Poetry mini-anthologies (2015-2017), chair of the NSW Premier's Literary Award (Kenneth Slessor Award for Poetry), and co-editor for the Australasian Association of Writing Program's literary journal, Meniscus. Jen's recent works include the scholarly volumes Researching Creative Writing (2015), Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts (with Caroline Turner; 2016); and the Oxford University Press bibliography entry for Pierre Bourdieu (2017). Her recent volumes of poetry include Stolen Stories, Borrowed Lines (2015), Sentences from the Archive (2016), and Moving Targets (2018). She produced all the photographs for a collaborative poetry/photography volume, with Paul Hetherington: Watching the World (2015). With Paul Hetherington, she is also editor of the bilingual (Chinese/Australian) anthology of poetry, Open Windows: Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016); and of the academic journal Axon: Creative Explorations.Review Quotes: "Micah McCrary offers a careful elaboration of a creative writing that integrates multilingualism, antiracist praxis, intersectional understanding, and trauma-informed pedagogy. Prioritizing the culture in the writer's work of cultural production, this collection of essays will be transformative for literary pedagogy and practice." --Janelle Adsit, Associate Professor, English, Cal Poly Humboldt, USA