Creative Writing with Robin Reid D.

Hello! My name is Robin Reid. I'm a poet and artist who has been engaging young people in classrooms and community settings with creative education since 2014! My poetry has been published across the United States by large institutions like Yale University, to smaller independent presses like Foglifter Press in San Fransisco. I believe in the transformative qualities of art and writing, and bring a creative approach to working with young people. I respect the discipline that a creative process demands, while also honoring the idea that the core of all creative processes are freedom and experimentation. Lessons with me are the best mix of fun work and hard play. Through a series of generative writing exercises and reading reflections, students will both acquire skills and vocabulary common in the field of writing, and begin or continue to develop their own unique voice as writers. A child of a painter and school teacher, I have been writing and making art all my life. I was awarded the Comfort Scholarship for Excellence in Writing and the Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize while an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and received my Masters of Fine Arts in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I was a New Artists Society Scholar. While in graduate school, I worked with undergraduate and early college (high school) students around subjects of creative and academic writing. Since graduating, I have stayed in Chicago, where I work as a teaching artist in elementary and high schools, using poetry and interdisciplinary art to discuss issues of social justice and emotional development with diverse communities of young people. In 2019 I was recognized by the Windy City Times as a "30 Under 30" for my work in public schools.