Bringing Baltimore Writers Together
Photo by Will Kirk
Writers in Baltimore Schools brings together Johns Hopkins undergraduates and Baltimore City students of all ages in creative practice and fellowship
"Sometimes I say to people out of state, 'I go to City College,'" she says, "and they're like, 'Oh, you're in college?' And I say, 'No, no, no, I'm in 12th grade.' They're like, 'but you said that you go to a college.'" Here, she pauses to laugh. "I just give up explaining."
Once a week, however, Abrams does attend a college course, Community-Based Learning: Creative Writing and Social Engagement, where Hopkins undergraduates and public high school students discuss creative writing. When the school day is long over, she boards a bus bound for Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus and heads to Gilman Hall. There, she finds an empty seat at the long oak table in the John T. Irwin Seminar Room, where large windows illuminate shelves upon shelves of rare books in a glass case at the front of the room. The whiteboard contains a palimpsest of scrawlings from graduate workshops past: caesura, zeugma, spondee. One would hardly expect to find high school students in the room except for a revealing clue: a Minecraft backpack on the floor.
The class is just one of many programs offered by Writers in Baltimore Schools, an initiative that empowers Baltimore City Public Schools students through creative practice, community, and mentorship to not just develop as writers, but to see themselves as writers with something worth saying. Through WBS's partnership with Johns Hopkins, students are also given space to envision themselves as future college students.