For nearly three decades, writers from the University of Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing have traveled to Arkansas’s public and private schools to enrich classrooms by contributing a unique dose of teaching methods. The workshops and sessions these writers teach open avenues for student creativity and sharpen students’ language skills across the state. Writers in the Schools combines and condenses these proven techniques.

The lesson in this valuable text is that the imagination is the greatest tool a student possesses. Instead of lectures, the book relies on hands-on exercises and time tested activity plans that start students writing within minutes of discussing the basics of the writing process. Included are dozens of ideas to spark student creativity and hone rough drafts into finished poems and short stories.

The chapters proceed from a beginning level through intermediate and advanced levels and are useful to students in any grade from elementary through high school. Written and compiled by Susan Perabo, a former Writers in the Schools director, this volume is both a wonderful aid to teachers wishing to expand their classroom strategies in language arts and a perfect guide for writing program participants as they work with children to encourage powerful written expression in every discipline.

Susan Perabo is writer in residence and teaches creative writing and English at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. A 1992 winner of the Hen field Prize Transatlantic Fellowship, she has published stories in Missouri Review, Story, TriQuarterly, and many other magazines. Her fiction has been twice anthologized, in New Stories from the South and in Best American Short Stories 1996.