Spring 2025 - Present

Harris County Jail is a tough place. Even so, the writers I worked with were eager and reflective, mining their life experience and imagination to create beautiful work that transcended their circumstances. An anthology of their writing is in the works!

Click HERE to watch a video on the work we do at the HCJ.

Spring 2025 - Present

Houston’s East End is my home. What a privilege it was to work with immigrant students at my old rival school, Chavez High, in an all-Spanish Poetry workshop that culminated in a published anthology and a public reading at MFA Houston. The students really put their hearts into their writing and performances!

Click here to learn more about Iconoclast Artists.

Fall 2024 - Present

My students at Patterson and Park Place Elementary never ceased to surprise me. They wrote in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and sometimes combinations of all those languages. I was delighted by their interest in the frightening and the supernatural. Pictured above is a third-grade writing sample telling in Spanish the story of a boy whose legs were cut off by a freight train—a not uncommon event in this industrialized area of Houston.

Spring 2025

The Menil Collection is one of the largest and most important private art collections in the world. I was lucky for the opportunity to lead creative writing tours of the museum for elementary - high school students. Reflecting predominantly on the surrealist exhibits and the abstract expressionism of Cy Twombly, my students crafted poems, stories, mythologies, and reflections slightly askew of reality. They pushed into the weird with zeal. I couldn’t have asked for better.

Fall 2024

Looking at examples from Charles Dickens, Flannery O’Connor, Rickey Fayne, James McBride and others, we studies setting as the birthplace of character personality. Students then applied that ethos to their own work, allowing setting to drive characters into action. Setting is the seed of story!

Spring 2023

Writespace is Houston’s best creative writing educational organization focusing on genre writing such as horror, fantasy, and romance. I have taught several classes here bridging the perceived divide between genre and literary writing. Goblins, murderers and busty heroines deserve good dialogue and intricately crafted settings, too!

Austin Bat Cave is Austin’s most active educational nonprofit focusing on the literary arts. I had the pleasure of helping to develop a dual language poetry curriculum pulling from canonical works and teaching culturally relevant oral modes as a literary art forms. Students wrote poems and stories and submitted them to ABC’s end-of-year literary publication.