ERIN CONWAY

Erin completed her undergraduate and graduate degrees at UW-Madison. Erin is fluent in English and Spanish. She began her professional career as a bilingual teacher in the Madison Metropolitan School District. Her desire to seek a deeper understanding of her students and foster intercultural connections in the field of education lead her to accept a Peace Corps assignment in Guatemala.

 

Erin mapped her first career journey—classrooms, community-based organizations, and nonprofits at home and abroad—through a variety of educational and administrative spaces, lifting up important ideas, providing access to resources, learning new languages, defining words in common, and sharing the value of experiences.

​

Once when asked, “What do you like best about teaching?”

She replied, “The storytelling.”

​

Erin seeks out new opportunities to celebrate stories, because she believes that collaborating to achieve shared goals is an important step towards achieving her own writing goals. She is a multiyear review panelist for the Cybils Young Adult awards and Multicultural Children’s Book Day, a regional and national juror for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, a member of the Zoetic Press social media team and volunteer reader for CRAFT Literary as well as an editorial assistant for the Interview/Craft &Critical Essays section. Publishing credits include writing and editing print and digital educational resources, newsletters, blogs, and social media in English and Spanish. Erin’s fiction and creative nonfiction work has been published in a variety of literary magazines.

 

Throughout the years spent in Guatemala, Erin started and managed her own non profit, Weave. Hope. Inc., in order to promote literacy in the Mayan village of Santa Catarina Palopó. She was responsible for all fundraising and donor communication as well as program development and library staff training. She took advantage of learning backstrap weaving which remains a guiding framework for her first professional story. 

​

Currently Erin is a copywriter and editor on the Communications & Marketing team at Beloit College.