Bringing Baltimore writers together

Diamond Abrams, a 17-year-old student at City College—a prestigious public high school in Baltimore—is used to being mistaken for an undergrad.

"Sometimes I say to people out of state, 'I go to City College,'" she says, "and they're like, 'Oh, you're in college?' And I say, 'No, no, no, I'm in 12th grade.' They're like, 'but you said that you go to a college.'" Here, she pauses to laugh. "I just give up explaining."

Once a week, however, Abrams does attend a college course, Community-Based Learning: Creative Writing and Social Engagement, where Hopkins undergraduates and public high school students discuss creative writing. When the school day is long over, she boards a bus bound for Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus and heads to Gilman Hall. There, she finds an empty seat at the long oak table in the John T. Irwin Seminar Room, where large windows illuminate shelves upon shelves of rare books in a glass case at the front of the room. The whiteboard contains a palimpsest of scrawlings from graduate workshops past: caesura, zeugma, spondee. One would hardly expect to find high school students in the room except for a revealing clue: a Minecraft backpack on the floor.

The class is just one of many programs offered by Writers in Baltimore Schools, an initiative that empowers Baltimore City Public Schools students through creative practice, community, and mentorship to not just develop as writers, but to see themselves as writers with something worth saying. Through WBS's partnership with Johns Hopkins, students are also given space to envision themselves as future college students.

"We love [interacting] with the Hopkins students," Diamond says. "We're able to walk around Hopkins and get a feel for college life. It definitely helps me look at the future and think about what it'll be like for me when I'm a college student."

Though WBS and Johns Hopkins did not forge a curricular partnership until 2016, the program was founded by Writing Seminars alum Patrice Hutton, A&S '08, '15 (MA), when she was still a college senior. That year, Hutton and a friend piloted a writing workshop at Margaret Brent Elementary/Middle, which is located just blocks from JHU's Homewood campus. Having attended the Iowa Young Writers' Studio in high school, as well as other creative writing programs, Hutton understood the transformative power of belonging to a writing community and wanted to create that space for Baltimore students.

The oldest of four siblings, with a 13-year age gap between herself and the youngest, Hutton recalls watching the elementary and middle schools she'd attended adapt over time to the constraints imposed by No Child Left Behind. With federal funding predicated on student performance, classrooms became places tied less to intellectual exploration and more to exam preparation. "There was so much more teaching to the test," Hutton recalls. "There just wasn't that room in the classroom for creative writing. And I loved that part of elementary school so much. It was just sad to see that my little siblings who had very creative minds weren't getting that."

Hoping to create those kinds of experiences for students in Baltimore, Hutton applied for and won an Open Society Institute community fellowship, which enabled her to recruit more volunteer instructors and expand to other schools after graduation. The program grew to include more schools and even a one-week summer writing retreat for high schoolers in 2012.

The partnership with Hopkins was initiated by Writing Seminars professor Dora Malech in 2014. New to both Johns Hopkins and Baltimore, Malech was in search of a way to get involved with the local literary community. Previously, she lived in Iowa and directed an organization called the Iowa Youth Writing Project that brought creative writing programming to kids and teens, so she was thrilled to learn about WBS.

"I got excited about the work that they were doing and saw lots of possibilities for collaboration and potentially bringing that organization closer to the Writing Seminars community," Malech says. "And so I just cold emailed Patrice Hutton and asked her to get coffee and started getting involved more personally with the organization."

In 2016, Writers in Baltimore Schools and Hopkins jointly offered their inaugural community-based learning course, Poetry and Social Justice, bringing high school students to campus for the first time. It was also part of the JHU Center for Social Concern's inaugural cohort of Community-Based Learning courses, a series of classes that allow students and faculty to engage with the community. Nearly 10 years later, the tradition established by Malech still continues, with two CBL and WBS courses offered each year: Creative Writing and Social Engagement, and a two-part, year-long course series called Teaching Creative Writing in Baltimore Schools. Hutton handles the logistics of matching undergraduates with city classrooms and ensuring that high school students are able to get to the Homewood campus in time for class.

The Creative Writing and Social Engagement course is a variation on that first community-based learning course. Taught by a rotating group of faculty members, this spring's version was helmed by Lysley Tenorio, an associate professor in the Writing Seminars. For him, the most rewarding aspect of the course is seeing how much writing matters to his high school students.

"They already have really busy lives," he explains. "They're in school, and I know they have other activities as well. So the fact that they're committing to coming to campus once a week means they're doing this because they really love writing."

During the first half of the class, Tenorio facilitates an undergrad-only seminar on writing and teaching pedagogy. If he seems "sort of more in the background" during the second half of the class when the high schoolers arrive, it's by design; by allowing the undergrads to lead the high schoolers in small group discussions and writing activities, they learn how to successfully facilitate classroom conversations.

Many of the students who sign up for the course aren't Writing Seminars majors and are, like their professors, looking for a way to connect with the community beyond campus. Maryam Amosu, who earned her bachelor's degree in neuroscience in May, believes making time for the class during her busy senior year was entirely worth it.

"I [was] a Writing Seminars minor," she says, "and I love to be around kids. Being able to work with high school students in something that I love so much, which is writing, seemed like a perfect opportunity."

Students who want a more immersive experience working with Baltimore City students of all ages can sign up for Teaching Creative Writing in Baltimore Schools. This course is taught by Writing Seminars professor Katharine Noel, Hutton, and other visiting WBS teachers.

Image caption: Madison Epner, pictured center, during a session of Teaching Creative Writing in Baltimore Schools

Image credit: Larry Canner

In this course, students follow a curriculum created specifically by WBS, meeting to discuss pedagogy and lesson planning in addition to leading weekly writing groups in classrooms across the city. Students are also required to journal about their teaching experience and share their observations with their classmates. These journal entries often dictate classroom discussion; if multiple people document having issues with classroom management, for example, that might become the topic of conversation in the next class session. This model allows the classroom to become a place both of learning and support, molding students into more confident teachers.

Noel has taught the course for six years, but it was only two years ago that she developed it into a year-long class with support from a Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation grant.

"We were finding that the on-ramp was a little steep for students learning how to teach for the first time," Noel says. "There were also a lot of logistics about getting students into the classrooms. And so just when they were getting their feet under them, the semester would be done."

For some students, one year with students just isn't enough time. Recent graduate Madison Epner stayed involved for a second year, following her cohort of fourth graders into their final year at Furman L. Templeton Preparatory Academy, a Title I charter school in the Upton neighborhood of Baltimore.

"Anyone who has a conversation with me for longer than about 15 or 20 minutes will hear me talk about my students and what's going on in the classroom each week," says Epner, a member of JHU's Class of 2025.

Epner majored in the Writing Seminars, where she wrote and mounted several plays with the Witness Theatre, a student-run company for which she served as executive producer. Though she mostly taught her students from a set curriculum, she had the opportunity to veer off script and introduce her classroom to playwriting, something Epner never encountered herself until late in middle school.

Introducing new modes of self-expression to her students has been immensely rewarding for Epner. As her students have grown more confident as writers, Epner has noticed they've grown more self-assured in general: "Whenever we've given the students the chance to share their work in class, they're always cheering really loudly for each other. Hearing the way that they talk about themselves—'I'm smart, I'm hardworking, I'm kind, I'm beautiful'—has honestly made me have more of that positive self-talk for myself and my friends."

As Epner departs Hopkins and her students leave elementary school, Epner reflects on how WBS has readied her for the next phase of her life.

"I've seen my confidence grow in terms of being able to be a leader within my writing club classroom and also other places," she says. "And so I don't know exactly where I'm going, but I have a general direction, and I think that everything that I've learned through teaching has been really helpful."