Teaching Cultural Dexterity in Creative Writing

Aimed toward graduate student instructors and other creative writing educators, Teaching Cultural Dexterity in Creative Writing offers a formula for important changes in creative writing instruction-especially in literary/creative nonfiction, probing how instruction might become more inclusive and accessible for minoritized/marginalized student-authors. The book chapters use antiracist, trauma-informed, and anticolonial frameworks toward exploring the 21st-century professional, theoretical, and institutional concerns surrounding creative writing practices in North American higher education. As a result, the book explores ways creative writing pedagogies and theories might be adapted for racially and linguistically marginalized (by English) student-authors, who often inhabit minoritized positions within North American colleges and universities.

Applying as a frame the notion of cultural dexterity as it is taught to medical professionals to allow them to engage effectively with patients from all backgrounds, ethnics groups and with all sensitivities, Teaching Cultural Dexterity in Creative Writing examines why and how creative writing instruction needs to be urgently renegotiated. In this essential text for all creative writing instructors, McCray provides all the tools necessary to take positive action with discussions of potential readings, writing prompts and sample course materials.

Micah McCrary is author of Island in the City (University of Nebraska Press), a memoir-in-essays. His work also appears in the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and Essay Daily, among other publications. A contributing editor at Assay, Dr. McCrary lives in New York on Haudenosaunee homelands, where he researches global health humanities and teaches courses in writing studies, creative nonfiction, and the health humanities at Syracuse University. He additionally serves as a mentor-teacher and low-residency faculty in Wilkes University’s Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing.