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Writer as Reader

Writer as Reader: Discovering New Ways into the Text

October 24, 2025
9:30 am – 4:00 pm
In-person at Bard College

Registration is open!

This year, IWT’s Writer as Reader workshops will be held on Friday, October 24, 2025. Writer as Reader workshops model writing practices that inspire students to read more carefully, grasp meaning in complex texts, and build understanding through collaboration. Using diverse writing-to-read strategies, workshop participants explore novels, poetry, nonfiction, historical documents, plays, and fairy tales. Each workshop will highlight strategies that foster close reading and help readers develop an appreciation for the connections between different but related texts. Writer as Reader workshops emphasize the pedagogical value of teaching texts that are unfamiliar or challenging to students, prompting them to read with attentiveness and an open mind. 

IWT can also bring a Writer as Reader workshop to your school. If you are interested, please contact us at 845-752-4516 or [email protected].

2025 Workshop Descriptions

Click to read descriptions

Speak Again, Bright Angel: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is a dramatic, multisensory story shaped by the interplay of poetic language and visual movement—the rhythm of the human heart expressed in word and gesture. When the star-crossed lovers first meet, they dance, dodge, and dialogue their way through a shared sonnet. This workshop invites participants to explore Romeo and Juliet through writing, visual learning, and performance-based practices. We will examine how Shakespeare’s poetic rhythms create and intensify meaning and how the play’s staging invites imaginative interpretations. Activities will include collaborative sonnet writing, storyboarding, listening to audio texts, and performing excerpts with simple acting techniques. Participants will leave the workshop with practical, creative strategies for helping students read and experience Romeo and Juliet as a dynamic, living text.

Texts: William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Kevin Stroud (host), “The English of Romeo and Juliet (No. 175)” in The History of English Podcast; John McDonald, Romeo and Juliet: The Graphic Novel

Silenced Voices: Cristina Henríquez’s The Book of Unknown Americans and Jose Antonio Vargas’s “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant”

This workshop invites participants to explore themes of identity, immigration, and belonging through Cristina Henríquez’s acclaimed novel The Book of Unknown Americans and Jose Antonio Vargas’s essay “My Life As An Undocumented Immigrant.”  Writing together in response to key passages, participants will engage with the silenced voices in these texts and consider how personal narratives shape our understanding of immigration. Using shared practices of storytelling, we will craft our own responses to what it means to be silenced. We will also explore strategies for bridging creative writing and academic analysis, incorporating personal narratives as a foundation for analytical writing. The workshop will highlight how storytelling can enhance students’ writing skills and equip them to write with empathy and rigor.

Texts: Cristina Henríquez, The Book of Unknown Americans; Jose Antonio Vargas, “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant”

“I Leave Before Dark Comes”: New Readings of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House

“I just devoured it,” author Carmen Maria Machado said of The Haunting of Hill House. Stephen King famously praised Shirley Jackson as a storyteller “who never needed to raise her voice.” First published in 1959, this gothic tale of Eleanor Vance and the haunted house she inhabits has inspired movies, games, a Netflix series, and parodies. The novel leaves readers wondering: is the house truly haunted? Or are its fits of wild laughter and ghostly tricks manifestations of Eleanor’s intense desire to belong somewhere and to someone? In this workshop, we will explore fresh readings of Hill House, drawing on Jackson’s hand-drawn sketches for the book, excerpts from her diaries and letters housed in the Library of Congress, and historical photos of America’s late-nineteenth-century craze for séances and spirits. Putting this classic in dialogue with literary precedents and recent spinoffs, we will shine a spectral light into Hill House’s spiderwebbed corners and “triumphant” tower.

This workshop is supported in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program.

Texts: Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; selected criticism, archival photos, and video clips

From the Praised to the Unnamed: The Role of Women in Homer’s The Odyssey

“Tell me about a complicated man…” begins Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Although Homer’s epic recounts the adventures of a male protagonist, it is the many women throughout the tale who invite us to examine complexities of gender, hierarchy, race, and class that still impact our society today. In this workshop we will read sections of Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey alongside selections from Madeline Miller’s bestselling fantasy novel Circe in order to reconsider the roles of women in this renowned story—from goddesses and queens to the poor and enslaved. Drawing on art, poetry, and writing-to-read practices, we will examine how point of view, gender, and authorial intent shape our understanding of these epic protagonists. 

Texts: Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson); Madeline Miller, Circe

The Singularity of the Human: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Megan O’Gielbyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine

We are living at a moment when artificial intelligence is increasingly capable of mimicking human reasoning and creativity, toppling some of the last ramparts of humanity’s claim to uniqueness. Meghan O’Gieblyn explores this historical inflection point from multiple angles in God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. The question of what it means to be human likewise animates Kazuo Ishiguro’s visionary novel Never Let Me Go, which tracks a young woman’s gradual discovery that she is a clone created to supply privileged humans with vital organs. Together, these two texts allow us to look afresh at what it means to be human at a time when our definitions of personhood are being called into question. Using writing-to-read and other in-class writing practices, we’ll probe the intersections of technology, philosophy, and literary narrative to generate our own questions about the human prospect in an age of intelligent machines. 

Texts: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; Megan O’Gielbyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

Constructing Hamlet

Plays are crafted. We will walk backwards through Hamlet, starting at the play’s bloody conclusion and Hamlet’s death. As though unstringing a necklace of beads, we will follow the plot backwards to see more clearly how Shakespeare unfolds the story and seduces the audience into caring deeply about his invented characters. What do we need to know about them early on? What do we discover later, and why? How does this careful sequencing of events intensify our curiosity and investment? We will also look at a short story, Richard Shelton’s “The Stones,” to see how this construction can happen in other genres. We will help students see what writers are up to and how dramaturgical approaches to plot and character can enhance students’ sense of structure and storytelling.

Texts: William Shakespeare, Hamlet; Richard Shelton, “The Stones”

What Is Beyond Hope? Fairy Tales in the Classroom

“Whom does a marvelous fate befall in fairy tales? He who trusts hopelessly in what is beyond hope.” This provocative idea comes from Cristina Campo, the Italian writer who devoted many revelatory essays to the subject. In this workshop, we will read Campo along with other recent theorists of the form. We will also read and write about fairy tales—from Hans Christian Andersen to One Thousand and One Nights to Anishinaabe folklore—with a few goals in mind: to consider ways to bring this foundational cultural material into the classroom, to explore the deep psychic roots of fairy tales, and to practice serious play by reimagining stories that speak to us and our students in profound ways. As Campo writes: “It is worth noting that a writer who attempts a fairy tale unfailingly produces his best prose, becoming a writer even if he has never been one before.” Together, we will explore how fairy tales might help us and our students discover new facets of our writerly voices.

Texts: A packet of selected fairy tales will be provided in advance.

Hearing God’s Trombones: The Poetry of James Weldon Johnson

During his work for the NAACP in the American South in the 1920s, activist and poet James Weldon Johnson reluctantly attended a church service and listened to a sermon by (in his words) an “old-time Negro preacher.” Although not a religious man, Johnson was moved by the performance of the preacher, who applied “the full gamut of his wonderful voice”—a voice that Weldon likened to the expansive musicality of a trombone. Before the sermon had ended, he had begun jotting down ideas for the first poem in the collection that became God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. God’s Trombones is regarded as one of the great works of the Harlem Renaissance and literary modernism, inviting us to think about the relationship between performed and written text, poetic imagery, Biblical traditions, modernism, and race. We will use a variety of writing and close-listening practices to engage with Johnson’s poetry as well as archival recordings of sermons, poetry, and music from the Library of Congress Digital Collections in order to complicate and extend our engagement with God’s Trombones.

This workshop is supported in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program.

Text: James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse

Exploring Ugliness: Gregor Samsa in the Instagram Age

In Ugliness (2025), Moshtari Hilal, an Afghan-born writer who lives in Germany, combines autobiography with cultural analysis to explore how our beliefs about ugliness can alienate us from one another and from ourselves. She ranges from examinations of her own nose in the mirror to a broader consideration of our shared cultural fear of ugliness. She considers how ugliness shapes our beliefs about hierarchy, immigration, illness, and belonging. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s Gregor Samsa embodies ugliness in Hilal’s sense: transformed into a monstrous bug, Samsa is socially unacceptable to the point that even his own family turns away in disgust. We will explore how both these works speak to our students’ experiences of a social media culture that promotes anxiety and threatens humiliation. Using various writing practices, we will ask: Are we afraid of ugliness, and if so, why? How can we read Samsa as a metaphor for some part of all of us? How does that metaphor illuminate Hilal’s view of ugliness? How might rethinking our assumptions around ugliness transform us all?

Texts: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis; Moshtari Hilal, Ugliness

She Wanted Something Other: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

This workshop explores instructive connections and distinctions between Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. We will study these respective portraits of childhood framed by class, race, and gender, as well as their particular geographies—:a multiethnic neighborhood in Lorrain, Ohio (Morrison’s hometown), and, in Ward’s novel, a rural area outside of Bois Sauvage (a fictional Mississippi town). We will consider how visual art and place-based writing can support students’ work with these novels. Our workshop will use writing to examine how both novels revise historical narratives—American literacy primers in The Bluest Eye and Greek mythology in Salvage the Bones. Participants will practice writing-to-read strategies and consider how they would adapt them to their classrooms. We will discuss how in-class writing and odd-angled writing assignments can be alternatives to traditional papers focused on literary analysis and consider practices that can discourage overreliance on AI-generated writing.

Texts: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (selections)

Registration and Fees

  • Tuition
    Fee: $635
     
    Early-Bird Fee: $560
    The Early-Bird deadline is September 24, 2025. Tuition must be paid in full prior to the workshop.

    Group Discount Fee: $572
    10 percent discount for groups of three or more teachers from the same school.

    Early-Bird Group Discount Fee: $504
    10 percent discount for teams of three or more teachers from the same school. All must register by September 24, 2025; tuition must be paid in full prior to the workshop.

    Cancellation policy. No refunds will be issued for cancellations made later than one week before the workshops.
    REGISTER TODAY!
  • Credit and Scholarship Opportunities
    CTLE Credit
    All Bard IWT workshops are Continuing Teacher and Leader Education approved in New York State. A Writer as Reader workshop is 5 CTLE hours. 

    The Teresa Vilardi Scholarship
    IWT welcomes scholarship applications from those studying to become teachers (i.e., those registered in Bard’s MAT Program or another accredited undergraduate or graduate program in education) and in-service teachers with limited professional development funds. Scholarship applications are open!

    APPLY TODAY!

Hear it from our participants

“It gave me a chance to be a student—to step out of my teacher self and into my experiential self—and to be reminded of the joy and possibility that exist on the other side.”​​​​​​

—2024 Writer as Reader participant

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