My Author Story
I spent 20 years in academia, churning out journal articles. Once I learned the formula for composing essays likely to survive peer review, I became a successful, respected scholar. I'm not knocking it. I'm proud of those articles. But they represent only part of who I am as a writer and thinker.
Like many academic or technical writers I know, I enjoyed a writing life before peer reviews and impact factors. Creative writing was my childhood passion. I built my identity around it. I dabbled in creative nonfiction, but immersed myself in poetry.
My most meaningful writing experiences in academia occurred when I found ways to weave my creative urges around voice, rhythm, and sound together with the analytical impulses of academic writing. So I built the Art of Reach to support other authors who want to strengthen their writing voices, incorporate creative elements, find platforms for unique projects, and find a broader audience for their ideas.
In addition those journal articles, I've published:
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poetry, including "Becoming Joey," a 2007 commended winner of the Margaret Reid Poetry Contest, later highlighted when Learning for Justice invited teenage spoken word artist Gabriela Bovea to perform it for a short film;
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creative nonfiction essays, including my "flash nonfiction" essay, Taco Night, which is my most widely read bit of writing;
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magazine articles, including "Avoiding Racial Equity Detours" and "How Trauma-Informed Are We, Really?";
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authored books, including national award winners Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership (coauthored by the brilliant Katy Swalwell) and Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap; and
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edited books, including Voices for Diversity and Social Justice: A Literary Education Anthology (with Julie Landsman and Rosanna Salcedo).
Find a complete list of my publications here (my web site) or here (Google Scholar).
Paul and Katy's book, Fix Injustice, Not Kids, highlighted as top new book in Amazon's education area.
Image of Paul Gorski's article, Avoiding Racial Equity Detours
Paul and Katy's book, Fix Injustice, Not Kids, highlighted as top new book in Amazon's education area.
Guest reader for my daughter's preschool class.
Teaching, Coaching, and Mentoring Writers
I've taught writing classes and led cross-genre writing workshops, mostly on writing for publication and writing for social justice. I've helped students and prospective authors consider how to work out of "writer's block," how to establish a style or tone for a particular project, and how to choose the right platform for their work. I'm grateful for my role as a coach and mentor of writers almost as much as I enjoy writing.
In one of my most recent roles, I'm the editor -- a sort of curator -- of a book series hosted by Routledge. In this role I've worked with two primary groups of authors:
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academics in education and the social sciences who publish a lot of traditional academic scholarship, but want to make their ideas compelling and engaging to a broader audience, and
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educators and others who may have written a couple articles for teachers or other practitioner audiences, but who want to expand their ideas into books.
Through this editor role and my experience writing books for a variety of publishers -- Routledge, Teachers College Press, Stylus (now part of Taylor & Francis), Rowman & Littlefield (now part of Bloomsbury), ASCD, and others -- I've developed a clear picture of the book publishing landscape. I know what publishers value in a proposal and a manuscript. I've used these understandings to help dozens of aspiring book authors find homes for their books. I can help you, too, whether you need a clearer understanding of the landscape, strategic support describing a book idea in a proposal, or help narrowing and refining a book topic.
Similarly, I've written for dozens of journals and magazines. I've been on editorial boards, edited special issues, and more. I can help you understand the journal and magazine landscape, too, and coach you through the submission and review process.
It would be an honor to support your efforts any way I can.