User:Writopiawiki/sandbox

Rebecca Wallace-Segall is a journalist and the founding executive director of Writopia Lab, a not for profit creative writing lab for children ages 6-17, based in New York City. Rebecca began writing for publications in 1997. She has contributed opeds about education and writing to the The Atlantic Monthly and The Wall Street Journal, and thought pieces to Takepart, The Huffington Post, and The Nation, along with five cover stories (and other pieces) to the Village Voice. She has contributed the foreword to Bryant Park's Poem in Your Day Chapbook 2012 and to The Scholastic Award's 2012 Best Teen Writing. She also served as Senior Editor at Psychology Today Magazine, and won Salon's "Best People Story of the Year Award" for "Love Labor’s Flossed." In 1999, she became a Journalism Fellow at Brandeis University. In 2003, she entered the world of comedy writing, and began writing and performing sketch comedy around NYC. She won a “Best Sketch” competition at the Upright Citizens Brigade in 2006.

Rebecca's teaching career started in 2002 as a resident writer in New York Public schools with the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. In 2003, she began establishing the creative writing program at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in NYC. She has also taught at SUNY Albany, NYU, Katherine Gibbs School and Gotham Writers' Workshop. Rebecca established Writopia Lab in 2007. In 2009, Rebecca was invited to join The Op-Ed Project Mentor Editor Program and has since helped several brilliant women break into some of the nation's most widely read national opinion pages.

Rebecca was awarded the 2012 Ovation Inspired Teacher Award by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, for submitting the most outstanding senior portfolios on the national level and for "developing a method of working with students that inspires them to create original work that embodies their unique, personal voice.... Because of [her] tutelage... these students are now empowered to bring that voice into the broader world..." She won their Gold Apple Teacher Award in 2008, 2009 and 2011.

She lectures at schools, events, and parents' organizations on a variety of topics including "How to Inspire the Writer Within Your Child," "Writing for High School and College Admittance," and on "Identifying and Participating in Positive Competitions."