Mitchell Jacobs

2018 Fulbright Scholar

Hometown

Minneapolis, MN

Major

MFA in Creative Writing

College

The Graduate School

 

Jacobs, a Minneapolis native, will be teaching English in Laos as part of the U.S. Fulbright Student Program. He recently earned his master of fine arts in creative writing from Purdue. Jacobs received the Budd and Betty Knoll Award for Best Overall Entry at the Purdue Literary Awards in 2016 and also collected the Academy of American Poets prize at Dartmouth College in 2013. He has also served as the managing editor of the Sycamore Review, Purdue’s internationally acclaimed literary journal, and as a community workshop leader with the Looseleaf Writing Workshop Series at Purdue.

 

“As I prepare for a future teaching creative writing, I seek strategies for reaching the broadest range of writers, including those for whom English is not their most comfortable mode of expression,” Jacobs said. “A poetry class I teach may contain only nonnative speakers or a single nonnative speaker who feels uncertain in a room of native-speaker peers. Frequently, these writers have innovative ways of utilizing language and valuable perspectives to add as well as stories lacking from the current literature. In encouraging Laotian students to express themselves in new ways, my goal is to become a responsive teacher to whatever type of learner comes my way.”