Poet and creative writing teacher Rachelle Cruz will share the history and background of the creative writing workshop in the United States, in addition to discussing questions that will allow participants to reexamine their own relationships to whiteness, power, and agency vis-à-vis teaching and learning through this model.

Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California.  She is the author of God's Will for Monsters (Inlandia, 2017), which won an American Book Award in 2018 and the 2016 Hillary Gravendyk Regional Poetry Prize.  She was appointed the 2018-2020 Inlandia Literary Laureate.  She co-edited Kuwento: Lost Things, an anthology of Philippine Myths (Carayan Press, 2015) with Melissa Sipin.  Her most recent book, Experiencing Comics: An Introduction to Reading, Discussing and Creating Comics, was published in Fall 2018.  She is a Lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside.

We Need New Metaphors: Reimagining Power in the Creative Writing Classroom