Michelle Kuo Comes to SLU for Writers Series
Attention all English majors, PCA majors, and anything in-between majors! Here on campus, St. Lawrence puts on this event once a month called the Writers’ Series.
They invite a writer to read their work, answer questions posed by students, and explore the terribly cold North Country. Plus, there’s always free cookies and lemonade. Please come listen to some truly talented writers and support the English Department!
This month’s writer is Michelle Kuo, who currently works as a professor at the American University of Paris in the History, Law and Society program.
Kuo is a memoirist whose award winning book “Reading with Patrick” follows her journey of teaching in prison. The work of non-fiction dives deep into questions of freedom, literacy, and quality of life itself.
She analyzes and inspects the intersectionality in the lives of those she teaches in San Quentin, and it becomes obvious that Kuo herself learned many things from teaching them.
“Reading with Patrick” has received many accolades, including being short-listed for the Goddard Riverside Social Justice Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Kuo has taken on a lot throughout the course of her career. She has worked as an immigrants’ lawyer in California, where she helped “workers stiffed out of wages, and families facing deportation,” as she explains in the bio in her website.
Her natural knack and genuine passion for social advocacy and justice remain present throughout her works, as she continues to navigate the complexities of race, gender, and more that implicate and ramify the criminal/social justice realm.
She also worked under Teach for America, which led her to work in Helena, Arkansas. Here, she “taught English at an alternative school for kids who were expelled from other schools,” as she again recounts on her website.
For those who may not know, Teach for America is a nonprofit organization that recruits teachers from all around the country to teach in impoverished areas, or areas that need education equity.
The organization’s official mission statement is to “enlist, develop, and mobilize as many as possible of our nation’s most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence.”
Another opportunity has arisen from Kuo’s experience, in which SLU’s WORD Studio organized an informational event on the Teach for America organization this past Wednesday, March 4. Kuo was supported by Viebranz Professor of Creative Writing Joe Wilkins who taught for the organization in Mississippi, and Education Professor Frank.
Sharing their experiences allow for interested students to learn more about the process of applying to Teach for America and what to expect, as well as giving them more confidence as they get closer to being able to go out and teach in their placements for two years once accepted and committed.
Michelle Kuo’s work spans past her memoir book, ranging from works about teaching, learning, the importance of literacy, and even “Breaking Bad”. These works can be found on her website at www.michellekuo.net. She also has a Ted Talk titled “The Healing Power of Reading”, in which she speaks on reading’s power and limitations.
Through literacy and teaching, Kuo always reminds us about the form of connection it grants us, writing in “Reading with Patrick” that, “A person must matter to another, it must mean something for two people to have passed time together, to have put work into each other and into becoming more fully themselves.
So even if I am wrong, if my dreaming is wrong, the alternative, to not dream at all, seems wrong, too.” The way she dissects social institutions reflect something bigger: friendship and connection. On behalf of the university and English department, I’d like to thank Michelle Kuo for giving her time to share her work with us, and reminding us what powers literacy can hold for anybody from any background.