Teaching Artist Showcase: “Teaching in the Neighborhood”

Alice George‘s collection of poetry – This Must Be The Place – was published by Mayapple Press in 2008. Her work has also been published in magazines such as Field, Diagram, Quarter After Eight, New Orleans Review and Sentence, as well as in eight anthologies. She teaches poetry to students in K-12 classrooms independently and through Columbia College’s Project AIM. An article about her arts integration work with 5th graders appears in the current issue of Teaching Artist Journal. Alice is also an instructor within the University of Chicago’s Graham School Certificate in Creative Writing program, and served as Faculty Advisor for the current Triquarterly issue, published by Northwestern University. A native of Kentucky, she lives and works in Evanston, and is married to sound and installation artist Shawn Decker. Painting is her next frontier; more information about her writing, teaching and art can be found at www.alicegeorge.org.

Eric Elshtain is a homemaker and poet. Through the non-profit foundation Snow City Arts, he is the poet-in-residence at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital where he conducts poetry and art workshops with patients ranging in age from six to 21. He has a PhD from the University of Chicago’s Committee on the History of Culture and he has been published in a wide variety of domestic and international journals, in print and on-line; journals such as McSweeney’s, Notre Dame Review, Skald, Fact-Simile, the Denver Quarterly, FIELD, American Letters & Commentary, New American Writing, &c. He is the editor of the on-line poetry chapbook press Beard of Bees.

Susanna Lang’s first collection of poems, Even Now, was published in 2008 by The Backwaters Press. A chapbook, Two by Two, was released in October 2011 from Finishing Line Press, and a new collection, Tracing the Lines, will be published by Brick Road Poetry Press in winter 2012. She has published original poems and essays, and translations from the French, in such journals as Little Star, New Letters, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Green Mountains Review, The Baltimore Review, Kalliope, Southern Poetry Review, World Literature Today, Chicago Review, New Directions, and Jubilat. Book publications include translations of Words in Stone and The Origin of Language, both by Yves Bonnefoy. She lives with her husband and son in Chicago, where she teaches in the Chicago Public Schools.

Toni Asante Lightfoot is a native of Washington, DC. She has been writing
and performing around the Western Hemisphere for 20 years. She is the
coeditor of Dre of AWord: a Tia Chucha Press anthology and edoti the It’s
Your Mug 15th Anniversary Anthology. She was the director of writing
programs at Young Chicago Authors. When the economy turned she decided to
have the most mellow midlife crisis ever by going back to school for
massage therapy and acupuncture. She is also currently trying desperately
to raise a 3 year old child and keep her writing from evolving around that.