Events, Classes, and Seminars

Yallah! Muslims Write is a monthly workshop with the expressed intent to foster a joyful, supportive, and courageous space for self-identifying Muslim artists.

This is a course for artists, writers, or any human wanting to better define their purpose in life. We will read historical manifestos as well as contemporary artist statements and look at those artist and writer's work in the context of their words. Participants will then write their own statements, leaving the class with a long version, a condensed version, and a sense of how their practice will change to follow their stated purpose.

Yallah! Muslims Write is a monthly workshop with the expressed intent to foster a joyful, supportive, and courageous space for self-identifying Muslim artists.

Yallah! Muslims Write is a monthly workshop with the expressed intent to foster a joyful, supportive, and courageous space for self-identifying Muslim artists.

This course for dedicated writers is designed to guide you through the writing and/or revising of your novel. It runs from September through May.

This six-month class is designed for memoirists in the early to mid stages of their memoir writing journey looking for consistent, in-depth feedback on their work. We will study four different memoirs in this class, along with several excerpts and essays.

This course for dedicated writers is designed to guide you through the writing and/or revising of your novel. It runs from September through May.

This course is a guide to the spirit and ethos of Oulipo and their collaborative experimental writing approach, designed to free the mind through constraint.
Each session will offer generative prompts and experimental forms for writers to respond to. No prior knowledge or skills required other than a sense of curiosity and a desire to test, try, and experiment with writing.

Throughout this eight week course, students will look at the many ways in which humans are connected to our natural surroundings, both urban and remote. Weather, soil, plants, wildlife, changing systems, and more will all be explored. By delving into the inherent close relationship humans have with the natural world, each student’s path to writing their own stories using the natural world as scaffolding will emerge.

In this class we’ll study and practice specific techniques used by established speculative fiction authors such as N.K. Jemisin and Nalo Hopkinson. We’ll examine examples of “worldbuilding in small doses” and try our hands at it. We’ll discuss the merits of creating worlds from the inside out versus going from the outside in. We’ll cover viewpoint, voice, neologisms, “found” texts, and other elements of this aspect of writing with exploratory and generative exercises.

Designed for writers who have an idea for a memoir in progress and are hoping to focus on character development, narrative energy and structure. In this six-week intensive, participants will generate 10-15 pages of additional material with a keen eye on the narrative bubbling beneath the surface.

In this brief two class session, students will work on several prompts and create an outline for their creative work.

Writers will work with a variety of prompts and in-class exercises to amplify the character development of their fictional characters.

In this class, we examine how hybrid memoirists strategize to tell stories that diverge from conventional forms of memoir and essay writing. In addition to practicing various poetic and nonfiction forms, participants will have the opportunity to deep dive into topics that interest them, such as art, literature, history, theory, myth, film, fashion, erotics, music, science, and more.

Lyrical writing prioritizes music, rhythm, and emotion over the narrative arc. In this course, we will find entry into writing through reading, conversation, and various prompts and exercises to catalyze memory and insight.

In this generative writing class, we will explore meaning via the mortal body—the foundation of what it means to be human—as a fruitful landscape for creative reflection, risk-taking, and art making.

The memoirella is a great form of literature that fits somewhere between an essay and a memoir. The first few weeks of the class will be focused on generative writing for your memoirella, and throughout the cohort we will have different types of workshops: one focused on opening pages; one on back-of-the-book summaries and 1-page pitches; and chapter excerpts.

In this generative class we will close-read—and write—alongside works that resist easy classification, including “Everyday Barf” by Eileen Myles, “Dead Doe” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “Exhausting a Place in Paris” by Georges Perec, Christina Sharpe’s “The Shapes of Grief,” and Rekdal’s “Nightingale: A Gloss.” Writers will come away with sharpened tools of observation, tactile craft practices, a portfolio of fresh writing starts, and a keener sense of the uncommon and the poetic within the everyday—on and off the page.