Sara Holbrook Michael Salinger Outspoken Literacy

Sara and Michael are award winning performance poets with over 20 years experience teaching writing, engagement strategies, oral performance skills, and revision techniques. We provide assemblies for kids, classroom workshops, and professional development that doesn't suck. Practical, effective and fun. We are full time writer/consultants, visiting schools and teaching in grades K-12, adapting our lessons to the needs of the classrooms we visit. We have visited schools all over the USA and over 50 international schools and have extensive experience with English language learners. Please check out our most recent work, book titles, upcoming appearances and articles at our website: www.outspokenlit.com We have spoken at state, regional, national and international reading and language arts conferences in addition to providing continuing education workshops for teachers.

We believe that poetry is not only an art product, but a vehicle for and an artifact of learning. We have taught poetry to senior IB calculus students and title one primary students. What we know is that kids want to be heard, they want to write about their lives and their learning. Poetry is a terrific way for young writers to find their voices.

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Michael Salinger and Sara Holbrook

Michael is an eight time captain and coach of the Cleveland Slam team that represented the city at the National Poetry Slam competition, he has also served on the board Poetry Slam, Inc., the governing body of Poetry Slams across the country where he created the position of Education Director by founding and acting as head of faculty of the annual Poetry Cross Training Conference held at SUNY Oneonta.

His latest publication, Stingray, was published by Word Smith Press of Ann Arbor in the fall of 2007. He has five previous collections published including Neon, a collection of poetry and short stories published by Bottom Dog Press of Bowling Green University. He co-authored the teacher professional books: Outspoken and High Definition, published by Heinemann, with his partner noted children’s author and poet Sara Holbrook. His award winning collection of YA poetry Well Defined (humorous definition poems for SAT level vocabulary words) is available through Boyds Mills Press.

He teaches writing and performance workshops in colleges, high schools, and middle schools across the country as a visiting author and teaching artist. He is a frequent presenter at national, state and local teacher conferences such as the National Conference of Teachers of English. He also teaches internationally in such far flung locals as Almaty Kazakhstan, Zagreb, Croatia and Shanghai, China.

Sara is the author of over a dozen poetry books for kids, teens and adults in addition to books for teachers. (publications listed on her website at www.saraholbrook.com.)

She has been conducting student and teacher workshops in schools all around the world for over 20 years. In addition she is a frequent speaker at local, state, national and international reading conferences. She is a performance poet and doesn't believe that a poem begins to come alive until it is read aloud. Jane Yolen says of her: "She does not speak a poem or even perform a poem. She sticks her hand down the poem's throat and pulls it inside out. She makes you laugh, cry, feel. She makes you want to hear the poem again." http://outspokenlit.com/