Allyson Even, Outreach Coordinator at the Kelly Writers House, has created some wonderful creative writing programming for West Philly high school students. The current issue of
Philadelphia Weekly features an
article on what Allyson has been doing. Here are several paragraphs that give you the background:
Last year, Even, a Latin American Latino Studies and Africana Studies major and a Creative Writing and Urban Education minor (yes, two majors and two minors), was hired as a work-study student to revive community outreach at Penn’s Kelly Writers House. The afternoon at West Philadelphia Catholic was just one of the many small-scale initiatives she organized, but the event prompted her to question whether the current outreach offerings at Penn was sufficient.
Currently, the Netter Center for Community Partnerships serves as a hub and sponsors for a comprehensive array of community services. Among these is Community School Student Partnership (CSSP), which recruits and trains Penn students to assist hired staff in mentoring and tutoring at West Philadelphia schools through a series of structured programs. The Kelly Writers House also hosts a series of literary-based outreach programs, including WriteOn!, in which fourth- through eighth-graders from two local schools come to the Writers House on select Fridays and Saturdays to engage with Penn students on extracurricular writing projects.
Allyson Even, Outreach Coordinator at the Kelly Writers House, has created some wonderful creative writing programming for West Philly high school students. The current issue of Philadelphia Weekly features an article on what Allyson has been doing. Here are several paragraphs that give you the background:
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
