By Sarah Senese ’23
Creativity & Innovation at Colorado College welcomes Felicia Rose Chavez as their first Bronfman Creativity & Innovation Scholar-in-Residence. Chavez, award-winning educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, is the author of “The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom,” and co-editor of “The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT,” as well as having taught courses at CC in English and Film and Media Studies from 2012-2018.
This three-year residency will allow Creativity & Innovation to become more integrated in the everyday lives of CC students, helping them connect with the program directly and also through specific C&I classes. Chavez herself will teach selected creativity-related blocks, including some revived from her past time teaching at CC. Some courses include: Podcasting; The Inspiration Lab; Audio Essay; and Creative Nonfiction Writing. An award-winning teacher, Chavez possesses a special gift for helping students to connect with each other, with the community, and to their own internal creative capacities.
Dez Stone Menendez, director of Creativity & Innovation, adds that “Felicia embodies the program’s goals to nurture students’ creative capacities and to support the college’s ongoing antiracist work. In this new role, Felicia’s work has the potential to benefit our entire CC community.” Chavez will work in collaboration with CC faculty members from all disciplines to develop and implement the curricular programs that will help build students’ creative capacities. There will be the potential for faculty workshops focusing on anti-racist pedagogy and the practice of creativity, and to engage audiences beyond the Colorado College community to invite for even more collaboration.
Chavez will also continue developing and sharing scholarly research, including the work accomplished in her book “The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom.” She will implement her own work in the classroom, supporting and platforming students of color, which Chavez describes as, “allowing a platform for them to exercise voice as well as correcting our canon, platforming the voices of writers of color.” For Chavez, “it’s more urgent than ever that we consciously work against traditions of dominance in the classroom.”
Felicia Chavez will be teaching classes and workshops this coming school year. Menendez, Chavez, and the whole Creativity & Innovation team would like to thank Kelly and Sam Bronfman for their support of the residency as well as their ongoing support of the entire program.