WRITERS IN COMMUNITIES
 

Writers in Communities (WIC) sends professional writers with specialized teaching experience into diverse community settings to work alongside students of all ages, needs, interests and abilities.

WIC writing workshops have been offered in schools, justice settings, neighborhood community centers, and healthcare facilities, among many other venues.

While in residence, WIC writers-in-residence help students create dynamic writing projects, often reflecting their own lives, that challenge, inspire, and enlighten. Most WIC residencies culminate in the publication of an anthology of participants’ work and a celebratory community reading. 

WIC Keeps Growing
It's been another record year for WIC. By the end of June, we had served 1,148 persons, reaching 81 percent of last year's total (1,423) in only the first six months of this year! Our audience is 95 percent youth, closely reflecting our community's demographics.

Writers in the Schools
This fall WIC launches “Word & Image,” an innovative pilot in five SAISD elementary schools. WIC writers-in-residence will partner in the classroom with visual artists from Southwest School of Art & Craft, leading fourth graders in combining creative writing with visual images. Funded by H-E-B, participants’ original poems and drawings will be printed on postcards for mailing to family and friends. This fall, WIC returns to middle schools in the North East Independent School District for the fourth year, adding a twelfth school to our roster.

Writers in the Juvenile Justice Setting
Bee Stings & Broken Wings, an anthology from the 2005 Children’s Storybook Project at the Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center, is now on sale. Some 500 copies have been distributed to teen parents in Methodist Healthcare Ministries’ MELD program to encourage reading to their children. Tesoro Petroleum’s generous in-kind donation of layout and printing freed funding for an additional Krier Center poetry workshop and a forthcoming anthology, In This Space, edited by former UTSA intern Chris Gamez. And this year’s Storybook project is underway, thanks to new funding from Verizon, the Charity Ball Association, Frost Bank, and Ford Salute to Education.

Writers Exploring Self
With “Beauty Is…” workshops presented at the Girl Scout Center and Juvenile Justice Academy, WIC continues creatively exploring issues of body image and self-esteem. An anthology of participants’ work was published in May, and selections were presented in a Dramatic Readers Theater production. The project caught the attention of Girl Scouts USA, who asked WIC to contribute ideas to the creation of a workbook for national distribution in their uniquely ME! program, supported by the Uniliver Corporation’s Dove Self-Esteem Fund. – 

At a "Beauty Is..." workshop

Writers in Communities Funders/Partners 
George W. Brackenridge Foundation
The Children's Bereavement Center of South Texas
Girl Scouts of the San Antonio Area
La Foccacia Italian Grill
Methodist Healthcare Ministries
North East Independent School District
San Antonio Express-News
Tesoro Petroleum
Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation