Troubadour Teaching Artists are professional writers and musicians who are also experienced teachers able to engage students of diverse backgrounds and abilities in the creative writing process. They combine passion for their art with knowledge of Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and best practices in the classroom.
Victor Cockburn
Executive Director, Co-Founder, Senior Teaching Artist
Victor has been combining his talents and expertise as a musician, lyricist, producer, performer and teacher to develop and present programs in schools since 1972. He received the Boston Parents' Paper Entertainer of the Year Award in 1991 and published "The Use of Folk Song and Songwriting in the Classroom" in the Harvard Education Review. A segment on Victor's work in schools was included in the PBS series, Art to Heart, Early Childhood Creativity. As Executive Producer of Troubadour's Talking Stone Productions, he has produced audio recordings of hundreds of multicultural narratives, poems and songs for major educational publishers, including Scholastic, MacMillan, Hampton-Brown, Jostens Learning, Harcourt-Brace, Silver Burdett Ginn and Curriculum Associates, as well as 60 episodes of "Try It!" a weekly educational program broadcast on Brookline Cable Television.
Judith Steinbergh
Director of Writing Programs, Co-Founder, Senior Teaching Artist
Judith has been active in the field of literary arts for over thirty-five years as a poet, writer, lyricist and teacher. She has published a book of poems for children (Marshmallow Worlds); four books of poems for adults (Lillian Bloom: A Separation, Motherwriter, A Living Anytime, and Writing My Will); and three textbooks on teaching poetry writing to children (Beyond Words: Writing Poems with Children co-authored with Elizabeth McKim; Reading and Writing Poetry: A Guide for Teachers, Grades K-4, Scholastic Books; and Reading and Writing Poetry with Teenagers, Walsh Publishers, co-authored with Fredric Lown). Judith received a Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship and the prestigious Spencer Foundation Grant for her research on "Poetry and the Developing Child" and has published articles in the Harvard Educational Review, the NCTE Language Arts and Reading Teacher, among other professional journals.
Jessica
Brown
Teaching Artist
Jessie has been teaching poetry in schools in Massachusetts and California since 1984. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Oberlin College, she is bilingual in Spanish, having also studied at University of Cordoba. She has received an Academy of American Poets Award and has had translations and poems published in local and national magazines such as Soundings East and American Poetry Review.
Elizabeth McKim
Teaching Artist
Elizabeth is a veteran poet and teacher and a member of Lesley University's National Faculty. She has performed her poetry in venues around the world and is author of four books of poetry and Beyond Words, Writing Poems with Children, a textbook on teaching poetry writing to children, co-authored with Judith Steinbergh. Her most recent book of poems is The Red Thread.
Ilene Miller
Teaching Artist
Ilene has been a classroom teacher for more than 35 years and is a contributor to the book, The Writing Process in Action. She was co-director of The Freelance Players, a theater group for children ages 8-12, and teaches writing in all genres to teachers and students.
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