Judith Tannenbaum

Judith Tannenbaum is a writer and teacher whose work has focused on community arts and issues of cultural democracy. She currently serves as training coordinator for San Francisco's WritersCorps program.

Judith has taught poetry in urban, rural, and suburban public schools through California Poets in the Schools, and at San Quentin and other state prisons through Arts-in-Corrections and the California Arts Council. Funded by the Arts Council, she created a cross-age community poetry program at the continuation high school in Albany, California, and at one of the town's primary schools. She also designed a poetry intensive for gifted teenagers that she taught for nine summers at UC Berkeley.

Judith has a strong commitment to prisoners and prison issues. She wrote and edited: California's Arts-in-Corrections newsletter, their book-length Manual For Artists Working In Prison, and the Handbook for Arts in the Youth Authority Program. She also completed a feasibility study for arts programming in Minnesota state prisons, and has participated in and chaired many panels on prison arts. She has taught in prisons across the country, and has been keynote speaker and on panels at many conferences on prison and prison arts.

In addition to Judith's nonfiction books, she has published one book, four chapter books, and one portfolio of poems, as well as individual poems in over five dozen magazines and anthologies. She is also the editor of Jump Write In!: Creative Writing Exercises for Diverse Communities, Grades 6-12.

She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is the mother of one adult daughter.