Peggy Simmons

My biggest interests are creative writing and fostering communities in which the traditionally voiceless play a vital role and where each person can fulfill their potential. Leading writing groups using Pat Schneider’s Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) method brings these passions together.

My experience in brief:

• Amherst Writers and Artists Writing Group Leader Certified, four years of experience participating in and co-leading AWA workshops.

• Ten years running and facilitating creative and communications workshops for children and adults of very different backgrounds, including working in some of the poorest neighborhoods of New York, Paris and London.

• Eleven years working alongside and training low-literacy youth and adults in retail establishments and in human rights anti-poverty projects.

• Published creative writer.

Please see my LinkedIn page for a professional resume: 

My experience less brief:

I began facilitating creative workshops in 1992 when I became a full-time volunteer with the International Fourth World Movement. During my seven years with the organization, my work included storywriting with children in Street Libraries in East New York, running a project for children in poor neighborhoods throughout western Europe to communicate with each other electronically, and developing a pilot project to use the internet to link young people from very different backgrounds throughout Europe in the fight against extreme poverty. My last position in the organization was Co-director of the Paris Area Regional Club of Knowledge and Solidarity, a project that brought together youth from very different Paris neighborhoods in anti-poverty projects.

Since leaving the International Fourth World Movement’s volunteer corps in 2000, I have taught English as a Foreign Language and managed retail establishments with low-income and low-literacy associates with Juma Ventures and at the bookstore at Laney College, a community college in Oakland, California. I have also been trained by and volunteered with Streetside Stories, 826 Valencia, The Beat Within and Project Read.

Since 2004, I have taken AWA workshops to develop my own writing. I have been published under a pseudonym in, as examples, Word Riot, the Sound and Literary Art Book and flashquake where I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I finished revising my first novel in the summer of 2008 and am currently looking for the best agent to represent it.

In the spring of 2005, I co-founded BREW, a writing workshop that uses the Amherst Writers and Artists method and has been meeting weekly ever since. BREW has published a collection of its writing and is in the final stages of publishing its second collection while choosing pieces for its third.

In 2007, I was certified as an AWA Writing Group Leader and began to bring together the different skills and passions I’d been pursuing for fifteen years:  developing the potential of low-literacy youth and adults, creative writing, and the proven techniques of the AWA method.

In February 2008, my youth writing workshop project was accepted into Intersection for the Arts’ incubator program. I named the project Green Windows and now run youth and diversity workshops in Oakland as well as workshops for the general public. More information about Green Windows can be found at http://greenwindowswriters.org.