YOUR TEACHER
Leslie Kirk Campbell, imagination activist, and national award winning author, is the founder and director of RIPE FRUIT School of Creative Writing, now in its 29th year. Highly praised as a teacher and “magical guide,” Ms Campbell has led writing workshops nationally and in the Bay Area for 26 years. More than 8000 students – lawyers, dog-walkers, journalists, midwives, teachers, children, octgenarians, and everything in between – have entered her “Greenhouse of the Imagination” where she has inspired them to trust in their own unique writing voice and guided them in their pursuit of originality and excellence in their writing.
Campbell has specialized in designing and teaching classes that provide a progressive, step-by-step process for developing writers: recognizing and eliciting creativity, discovering and developing the writing voice, exploring the alchemy of poetry, investigating memoir and personal essay writing, learning intuitive editing and deep revision, and growing the successful short story.
She calls this the “Ripe Fruit Experience“. With the confidence and craft her students have gained, many have been accepted to prestigious writing programs and published articles and books. Each student has fallen in love with the power and dexterity of language and enhanced, both as reader and writer, his or her relationship to the written word.
Leslie has made it her mission to listen to the wealth of diverse human voices inhabiting the earth. She has traveled the world, living in Nicaragua, Thailand, and 3 years in Florence, where she studied and translated modern Italian poetry and taught at the University of Firenze.
A poet, playwright, fiction and non-fiction writer, Leslie holds a BA in Comparative Thought & Literature from Stanford University, an MA in English & Creative Writing (poetry) from SF State University, and an MFA from Bennington (fiction). Leslie is currently working on a book of short fiction.
Leslie, a native Californian, lives in San Francisco with her husband and the youngest of her two sons.
