Four years after her first awkward months at Cornell, Jennine Capó Crucet became the first person in her family to earn a college degree, graduating Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in English. Richard Price had been the first to suggest that she apply to MFA programs, and after some serious thinking and a lot of hard work, she found herself in a graduate program a few years later. She worked with Charles Baxter and David Treuer, two writers she greatly admires. And Jennine got to try her hand at teaching, which was fun and rewarding she recalls; “it felt a lot like being on stage.”

Like Treuer and Baxter, Jennine feels that the best teachers of creative writing are the novels and stories of great writers themselves, and so the classes she teaches, much like the classes she has taken, involve as much reading as they do writing, and this has without fail produced better student work.  Register today for Centrum’s summer Port Townsend Writer’s Conference and learn from Jennine and many other leading voices in our world today.