This week’s featured classroom is located just down the road from SMITH Magazine’s Six-Word nerve center in Manhattan. The United Nations International School (UNIS) was founded in 1947 by United Nations affiliated families, and has multi-national staff from 70 countries and over 1,450 students from 120 countries. In other words, it’s a place that loves [...]

I’m thrilled to announce the release of the eighth book in the Six-Word Memoir series, Things Don’t Have to be Complicated: Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students Making Sense of the World, published with TED Books, a division of the TED Conference.

Quick links:
• Download the book
• View excerpt/slideshows in the Washington Post and Brain [...]

Every Six-Word Memoir book is a different process. They’re all bound by this simple concept—”your life in exactly six words”—but the vibe is never the same. And never has the experience of receiving the submissions been so intense and amazing as it has been for for our upcoming book, Things Don’t Have to be Complicated: [...]

This week’s student Six-Word savants attend Ridgeview High School in Orange Park, FL. English/Language Arts teacher Susan Mullen begins her lesson plan by trying to convey the power and art that can be encompassed in something as small as a single sentence. “I’ve been using lessons and activities from a wonderful book by Stanley Fish, [...]

Six-Word Memoir Video 7C from Lacey Boland on Vimeo.
Language arts teacher Lacey Boland keeps her classroom fresh and modern at Independence Charter School in Center City, Philadelphia by combining the benefits of literature and technology. She has taken language arts to the blogosphere.
For the past two years, Boland has had her 7th graders write Six-Word [...]

One of my favorite days of the year is the day I hang out with Lauren Redniss’ Senior Illustration Class at Parsons School of Design in NYC. It’s a special day, in part, because it’s such a thrill to see Lauren inspiring her students in her classroom; she’s a brilliant artist and author in her [...]

As another school year comes to a close, notes from teachers across the country continue to pour in with amazing stories of Six Words in the classroom. Whether it’s as a writing prompt, art project, or icebreaker, we love hearing—and seeing—how students are using the form to express themselves.
From Edinburg, Texas, 8th grade [...]

Since we launched the Six-Word Memoir project on this site in late 2006 and began publishing a series of books, we’ve been consistently blown away by how others have adopted the form, from six-word prayers to six-words on amazing moms (with One.org), to six words on Internet security—and, really, everything under and over and around [...]

The six-word memoir has proved to be an unexpectedly elegant and accessible tool for self-expression and personal storytelling. The form is now bigger than Hemingway, and certainly bigger than SMITH. From a reverend in North Carolina who preached six-word prayers, to a midwestern book blogger who created a six-word memoir meme, which still races across [...]