Bring the West and the Great Midwest to the South.
My students need professional writers and workshops that will bring Kitchens of the Great Midwest and their personal writing to life and challenge their intellectual lives.
FULLY FUNDED! Ms. M.'s classroom raised $2,424
This project is fully funded
My Students
My students are artists who think about the world and their learning in an abstract way. They come from diverse backgrounds and are all very proud to go to our school, which serves as their home away from home. My classes are mixed levels, and every student has a particular talent that allows them to shine, in and out of the classroom. They all are committed to various art forms and look for ways to incorporate themes and ideas from our class into their work.
My Project
This project is a joint collaboration between the English and Creative Writing Departments at my high school. We plan on bringing J. Ryan Stradal and George Ducker, two professional writers based in Los Angeles, CA, to South Carolina for a series of writing workshops with our students. Stradal's first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, was published by Viking/Pamela Dorman Books on July 28th, 2015, and reached the New York Times Hardcover Best Seller list at #19 on its third week of release. Stradal has often worked in television, story editing or producing shows for VH-1, MTV, ABC, FOX, TLC, A&E, Discovery, and History. Since 2008, he's worked as the senior story producer on “Deadliest Catch” and “Ice Road Truckers” and as a supervising producer on “IRT: Deadliest Roads,” "Storage Wars," and “Storage Wars: Texas.” George Ducker is a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Believer, and Bookforum. His poetry has appeared on such venerable websites as The Awl and The Rumpus. His short film A Hole In Tiger Mountain recently premiered at the Sun Valley Film Festival.
This project will make a dramatic difference in the lives of over 100 students by providing them an opportunity to learn about success in professional writing and to work with two literary heroes.
My students are reading Kitchens of the Great Midwest in our English IV class and they are studying writing for theatre and television. The Creative Writing students at my school are hoping to become professional writers. This project will not only fuse a collaboration between two awesome departments, but students will be able to study what it takes to "make it" in the literary world.
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