 The
2003 Association of Teaching Artists’ Teaching Artist
Distinguished Service to The Arts In Education Field Award
will honor Barbara Fisher and Richard Spiegel. The Award
was created in 2002 to honor individual artist educators
who not only pioneered the Arts In Education Field, but
who also continue to define the best of what it means to
be a Teaching Artist. This award is the first in the
nation to recognize artist educators for service to the
Arts In Education field.
Richard Spiegel and Barbara Fisher, native New Yorkers,
met in 1977 while organizing the annual alternative press
New York Book Fair for which he was poetry coordinator and
she fiscal director. They’ve published Waterways: Poetry
in the Mainstream 11 times a year since 1978 giving voice
to adult poets from Indonesia to Coney Island. They’ve
published more than 2,000 separate student literary
magazines, and close to 10,000 youths since beginning
their partnership with NYC schools in 1979 first by
letterpress, then xerography, and more recently on the
web. Their program, The Waterways Project, began as a
collaboration of 30 small poetry presses determined to
bring poetry to the people coming to readings on piers,
riverbanks and waterfront areas of NY State.
Ten Penny Players,
their children’s theatre was begun in 1967 providing
live and puppet programs to youths of all ages. With a
particular mission to persons with disabilities they have
worked in hospitals, rehabilitative settings, self
contained special education classrooms, and prisons.
Spiegel has published 6 chapbooks of poetry, 2 of which
include his paintings; Fisher has written and illustrated
more than 25 books for children/young adults. They’ve
both been published extensively by the alternative press
and were married on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Click here to read Barbara
Fisher's Teaching Artists Journal.
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