I’ve been working with a group of teens during the Denver Writing Project’s Young Writer’s Camp this week. We gather on a college campus everyday at 9am and spend the day learning about writing from one another. It is the best kind of teaching, this lack of teaching, where young people come of their own accord (or sometimes at their parents’ insistence) and choose how to engage. They have these fantastic stories, speculations about what is possible in and beyond their world. It’s made me think about a question Jeffrey DeShell asked me during my dissertation defense about the void of creativity for creativity’s sake in much of education. I still don’t have an answer for him about why creativity so often goes unacknowledged in classrooms. I do know that as a college professor, I’ve lost a little bit of my drive toward creating with students in an effort to instead acknowledge the historic inequities that are so often reinforced in classrooms. It seems that as a white person it is easy to get mired in apologizing for my own history, rather than working with my colleagues and peers to recreate a future that actually honors everyone. That future must be a creative process. My brother (david stamatis) wrote this morning that he believes AI is the future of creative work. What does this mean for our young creatives who are fighting so hopefully for their space in an otherwise saturated digital world?