News & Features
Celebrating Our Community
We love to celebrate good news from our community and feature teachers and students in seasonal interviews conducted by Writing Salon staff. If you’re part of our community and would like to spread your good news, you can do so here.
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Accomplishments
Interviews
Publications
Interviews
Student Spotlight: Austin Smythe
Spring 2024
I’ve participated in the Round Robin at least ten times. At my first round, I can remember feeling hyped on the structure of accountability, that creative pressure to produce at least a little every day.
Interviews
Teacher Feature: Kerry Muir
Winter 2024
Sure! The idea for the film came to me in the Spring of 2018. I was listening to Freya Cellista’s sound collage “St. James Park” (from her brilliant album Finding San Jose) and suddenly saw—very clearly, in my mind’s eye—a young girl, small suitcase in hand, waiting for a train. She was alone in the world, en route to an interim foster home where a shady woman awaited her arrival.
Interviews
Student Spotlight: Anne Breedlove
Fall 2023
Friends and relatives who followed our adventures kept telling me I should write a book. I finally started writing in 2019, after signing up for your courses. While reading my pieces in the various classes many listeners were confused, bombarding me with questions
Interviews
Teacher Feature: Lisa Moore Ramée
Summer 2023
I originally imagined writing for adults honestly, but then I had kids and both were voracious readers. When my daughter started reading the same books that I had read as a young girl, it really bothered me that there weren’t books for her that featured Black girls like her.
Interviews
Student Spotlight: Jing Li
Spring 2023
1999. It was a weekend. I went to the SF Book Fair at Fort Mason, looking for some much needed intellectual “brain food” for myself, a professionally unfulfilled public high school teacher. What a fascinating sight it was inside the vast, high-ceilinged warehouse. A book paradise!
Interviews
Teacher Feature: Addie Tsai
Winter 2023
For those who enjoy astrology, my many Earth placements (I’m a Virgo sun, and I have five total Virgo placements, which isn’t even all my Earth!) keep me grounded and well organized, which is both a blessing and a challenge.
Interviews
Student Spotlight: Emily Knight
Fall 2022
The language of our oceans, lands, and air has long informed my writing. Marine science unlocked the world – gave names to the array of life and its building blocks, revealed new words I had never heard, like “nudibranch,” “tardigrade,” and “epifauna.”
Interviews
Teacher Feature: Jeff Chon
Summer 2022
I’ve always had a morbid fascination with conspiracy theories. That people believed these silly ideas seemed to me a conspiracy in and of itself. The 2016 election was a reminder of the kind of damage these ideas can inflict when weaponized by racists and misogynists
Interviews
Student Spotlight: Wendy A. Warren
Spring 2022
The Butcher’s Apprentice began as a short story for a 2019 writing workshop. I grew up in a rural area near a butcher who slaughtered and processed the local beef and pigs. I was fascinated about what went on in his barn because my family raised and ate our own small livestock.
Interviews
Teacher Feature: Erin Rodoni
Winter 2022
And If the Woods Carry You is my third poetry collection. It won the 2020 Southern Indiana Review Michael Waters Poetry Prize and was published on 12/1/21. The collection explores motherhood and childhood in a frightening and uncertain world much like ours, but maybe a hairbreadth closer to the worst of the impending climate catastrophes.
Interviews
Student Spotlight: Rowena Leong Singer
Fall 2021
Thank you! The contest has helped my writing on two fronts. First, it has given me a target date to complete my novel. When I submitted my entry to Book Pipeline’s contest, I had been working on the final draft of the novel.
Interviews
Teacher Feature: Preeti Vangani
Summer 2021
I used to be a brand manager in a previous life, before I moved to the US from Mumbai to study creative writing. Because I came to writing much later in life than a lot of my classmates, and hadn’t taken a more conventional route of studying creative writing in college, I wanted to find a way to pass on what I’d learned to those who didn’t have direct access to an arts/writing education.
Interviews
Teacher Feature: Alan Chazaro
Spring 2021
I’m a first-generation Bay Area Mexican American millennial, and many of my students often tell me that I’m laid back and extremely caring—or that they haven’t had many teachers like me. I think because of how I grew up and what school was like for me as a young male (academically struggled, almost flunked, went to community college), I am hyper-attentive to my student’s needs, and I get genuinely inspired and motivated by the success of my students.
Publications
Three of Mirabella Mitchell’s poems are published in ONE ART
Student Mirabella Mitchell has 3 poems published in ONE ART, two of which started as Round Robin Winter 2025 prompts.
