This unique and comprehensive text offers an original approach to teaching creative writing by exploring ideas, giving advice, and explaining workshop activities and has many contributors from some of today's most popular children's authors including: Jacqueline Wilson, Roger McGough, Philip Pullman, Malorie Blackman and David Almond.Creating Writers is a practical writing manual for teachers to use with upper primary and lower secondary level pupils that covers poetry, fiction and non-fiction.

Explore the fascinating lives and loves of the greatest novelists, poets, and playwrights. From William Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison, Writers explores more than 100 biographies of the world’s greatest writers. Each featured novelist, playwright, or poet is introduced by a stunning portrait, followed by photography and illustrations of locations and artifacts important in their lives – along with pages from original manuscripts, first editions, and their correspondence. Trace the friendships, loves, and rivalries that inspired each individual and affected their writing, revealing insights into the larger-than-life characters, plots, and evocative settings that they created. You will also uncover details each writer’s most famous pieces and understand the times and cultures they lived in – see how the world influenced them and how their works influenced the world. Writers introduces key ideas, themes, and literary techniques of each figure, revealing the imaginations and personalities behind some of the world's greatest novels, short stories, poems, and plays. A diverse variety of authors are covered, from the Middle Ages to present day, providing a compelling glimpse into the lives of the people behind the page.

Every nation is the invention of its writers. America is no exception. The United States is a state of mind and spirit created, in part, by the books that have emerged from the American experience - as truly as its politics have been shaped by history. We are all, in some fashion, the spiritual heirs of Poor Richard, Father Knickerbocker, Huckleberry Finn, and other cherished figures from our literary past. Writers have created our national image, not only in our eyes but in the eyes of the world. This book from American Heritage offers a panoramic view of the American scene and the American people by its own writers - from colonial days until modern times.

This new edition of Southern Writers assumes its distinguished predecessor's place as the essential reference on literary artists of the American South. Broadly expanded and thoroughly revised, it boasts 604 entries-nearly double the earlier edition's-written by 264 scholars. For every figure major and minor, from the venerable and canonical to the fresh and innovative, a biographical sketch and chronological list of published works provide comprehensive, concise, up-to-date information. Here in one convenient source are the South's novelists and short story writers, poets and dramatists, memoirists and essayists, journalists, scholars, and biographers from the colonial period to the twenty-first century. What constitutes a "southern writer" is always a matter for debate. Editors Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel have used a generous definition that turns on having a significant connection to the region, in either a personal or literary sense. New to this volume are younger writers who have emerged in the quarter century since the dictionary's original publication, as well as older talents previously unknown or unacknowledged. For almost every writer found in the previous edition, a new biography has been commissioned. Drawn from the very best minds on southern literature and covering the full spectrum of its practitioners, Southern Writers is an indispensable reference book for anyone intrigued by the subject.

Kentucky and Kentuckians are full of stories, which may be why so many present-day writers have Kentucky roots. Whether they left and returned, like Wendell Berry and Bobbie Ann Mason, or adopted Kentucky as home, like James Still and Jim Wayne Miller, or grew up and left for good, like Michael Dorris and Barbara Kingsolver, they have one connection: Kentucky has influenced their writing and their lives. L. Elisabeth Beattie explores this influence in twenty intimate interviews. Conversations with Kentucky Writers was more than three years in the making, as Beattie traveled across the state and beyond to capture oral histories on tape. Her exhaustive knowledge of these authors helped her draw out personal revelations about their work, their lives, and the nature of writing. When Still concludes his interview with "I believe I've told you more than anybody," he could be speaking for any of Beattie's subjects. Aspiring writers will learn that Mason submitted twenty stories to the New Yorker before one was accepted, and that Still wrote articles for Sunday school magazines. There's plenty of advice: Dorris tells budding authors to get real jobs, keep journals, and read everything, even cereal boxes, and Marsha Norman reminds playwrights that "it is not the business of the theater to provide writers with a living." Kingsolver advises, "Read good stuff and write bad stuff until eventually what you're writing begins to approximate what you're reading." Beattie's collection includes striking self-portraits of such writers as Sue Grafton, Leon Driskell, James Baker Hall, Fenton Johnson, George Ella Lyon, Taylor McCafferty, Ed McClanahan, Sena Naslund, Chris Offutt, Lee Pennington, and Betty Layman Receveur. What most distinguishes these moving conversations from other author interviews is their focus on creativity, on the teaching of writing, and on the authors' strong sense of place. As Wade Hall writes in his foreword, all twenty writers recognize that their works have been significantly influenced by their "Kentucky experience." This collection offers insights into Kentucky's rich and flowering literary heritage.

Linda Hogan and Contemporary Taiwanese Writers: an Ecocritical Study of Indigeneities and Environment is the first full length single-authored study of Native American writer Linda Hogan and the first book to address Hogan’s poetry and prose primarily from ecocritical perspectives (inclusive of ecofeminism, environmental justice, postcolonial ecocriticism, and animal studies). It also is unique for the reason that it is a comparative study of the work of Hogan and writings by Taiwanese environmental writers, scholars, and activists. Chapter One, which serves as the introduction to the book, written by and from the perspective of an indigene, begins by giving readers a glimpse into the kind of world in the east in which the author came of age. It then relates this world to the western worlds that Hogan writes about in her poetry and prose. Chapter Two focuses on Hogan’s most recently published novel, People of the Whale (2008), and on the arguments that the novel makes about the environmentally unsustainable acts of corporate globalization that involve the trade in endangered animal species. Huang relates those arguments to the oil industry in Taiwan and to the extirpation of cetacean species in the waters of Taiwan by this industry. Chapter Three is an analysis of the novel Mean Spirit (1990). Huang reads this novel mostly through the lens of environmental justice arguments. Chapter Four addresses the novel Solar Storms (1995) from the perspective of ecofeminist theory and in the context of the issue of the escalation of mega-dams in East Asia. Chapter Five analyses the novel Power from animal studies perspectives. Chapter Six is a comparative studies reading of poems by several prominent Chinese, Taiwanese, and Aboriginal poets—Taiwanese poet Ka-hsiang Liu, Paiwan poet Mona Neng, Atayal poet Walis Nokan, and Chinese-Taiwanese poet Guangzhong Yu—and Hogan’s latest collection of poetry, entitled Dark. Sweet: New & Selected Poems (2014). In his reading of this work, Huang relies on a definition of “ecopoetry” in Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street’s recently published The Ecopoetry Anthology (2013). He also brings together the main theoretical ecocritical terms that he discusses in the previous chapters.