Educator

Barbara Fischkin has taught students how to read and write journalism, creative nonfiction and fiction in the university classroom and for the country’s most respected writers’ organizations and institutes. Her innovative method for teaching writing across the curriculum simulates the atmosphere of a newsroom and utilizes the techniques of the fiction writing workshop, while emphasizing the crucial difference between fact and fiction.

Currently, Barbara Fischkin is co-chair and moderator of the PEN Writers Roundtable, which is open to all working writers in the New York Metropolitan area. As an author-participant in the PEN Readers and Writers Program she has worked with literacy programs which used her book Muddy Cup, as a teaching tool.

In June 2007 Barbara Fischkin founded the first annual “Writers on Autism” reading at the Empire State Building.
For the Poynter Institute, she has lectured on narrative nonfiction and on “How to Stop Thinking Like a Journalist and Start Thinking like a Novelist.” She has also spoken twice at the New York State Writers Institute at the State University of New York in Albany.

From 1999-2003 Barbara Fischkin was Visiting Director of Journalism at Adelphi University on Long Island, where she developed, ran and taught in the school’s first comprehensive journalism program while advising students who were resurrecting a formerly banned student newspaper. At New York University in the late 1990s, she taught Feature Writing and, in partnership with the university’s Center for Latin and Caribbean Studies, developed and taught a new graduate course, “Covering Latin and Caribbean Stories in the United States .”