National Community

Throughout April in honor of National Poetry Month, the Academy of American Poets will be celebrating the important role that correspondence has played in the lives of poets. To coincide with this theme, and in the spirit of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, the Academy is encouraging students throughout the United States to engage with poetry by handwriting letters to living poets, Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. They have also created a version of this project for the classroom in the form of a lesson plan prepared by a curriculum specialist that aligns with core-curriculum standards. You can learn all about the project by visiting www.poets.org/dearpoet. Feel free to also share what you have planned for National Poetry Month here, in the National Community, or on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter (using the hashtag #NPM13).

Join your colleagues in the nation's capital March 20–22, 2013 for the NWP Spring Meeting. Always an exciting event, the meeting gives Writing Project teachers and leaders an opportunity to share their classroom successes with members of Congress and with each other. Plan to participate in the NWP Spring Meeting professional development on Friday, What is College-Ready Writing, Anyway?, with keynote speaker Jessica Singer Early, Director, Central Arizona Writing Project and co-author of Real World Writing for Secondary Students, and interactive workshop led by Marcie Wolfe, Director, Institute for Literacy Studies at Lehman College, CUNY, and former director of the New York City Writing Project. More...

The Red Mountain Writing Project and the 21st Century Literacies Conference present the National Writing Project's  2013 Urban Sites Network Conference, Writers of Social Justice: How One Pen Can Change the World.  Join educators from around the country to explore how writing can empower students and teachers to enact social change in their communities. Registration Deadline: April 12, 2013. More...

NWP Connect offers many types of communities that members can join. Some are private and others are open. You can always join any of the open communities, and if you join them, their content will show up in the stream page on your personal commons.

Open communities often have a particular focus, so whether you're interested in resource sharing around the common core, or the education of English language learners, you can check them all out here.