Patrice Hutton Helps Baltimore Students Express Themselves Through Creative Writing
When Patrice Hutton, 37, was a student in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, part of the program included teaching creative writing at various middle and elementary schools near the Homewood campus. As she traveled between schools, she noticed a real disparity between what was being taught at the more privileged Roland Park Elementary/Middle School and the under-financed Barclay School just a few blocks away.
She also noticed that schools in general were moving away from creative writing as they were forced to keep up with the No Child Left Behind Act, which emphasizes core curriculum subjects like math and science over the arts. Given that writing had provided such a strong outlet in her own life, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
In 2008, thanks largely to a grant from Open Society Institute–Baltimore, she created Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS), an in-class program where students can express themselves through creative writing, from fiction to poetry to nonfiction. The program, which reaches approximately 140 students a year, has expanded over the years, and now includes writers’ workshops, mini retreats, and “write-ins,” as well as a summer camp.
The students also create zines, anthologies, and share some of their poetry on the back page of indie newspaper, the Baltimore Beat. We sat down with Hutton to discuss what she’s built.