Entering the House through the Window:
New Ways to Write the Familiar
Date: 2 Sundays, April 11 and 18
Time: 10 am - 3 pm (with 1-hour lunch break)
Instructors: MK Chavez and Maw Shein Win
Ages: Adult
Genre: Poetry/Fiction
Price: $275
In this workshop, we will explore innovative ways of creating poems and stories. Some of the areas that we will dive into include: transmitting the mysterious, using delight to expand imagination, and capturing the experience of music with words. We will mine a variety of different media including film soundtracks, audio prompts, and visual arts.
By the end of this class, participants will have played with language, explored new techniques, and have new resources and practices to keep them moving forward in their writing life. This lively class is excellent for both poets and flash prose writers, and new and experienced writers!
MK Chavez is the award-winning author of Mothermorphosis, Dear Animal, and Virgin Eyes. She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, CantoMundo, Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, VONA, North Street Collective Residence Program, Real-Time & Space Elevate Residency, and Napa Valley Writers Workshop.
MK is co-founder/curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and has been a guest curator of limited reading series at BAMPFA, and LOTERIA in partnership with the Institute of (Advanced) Uncertainty. She has been a visiting instructor at Stanford University, San Francisco State University, Mills College, Berkeley City College, San Francisco City College, BAMPFA, and Hedgebrook.
MK's most recent publications can be found in bags of coffee from Nomadic Coffee and on the Academy of American Poets website’s Poem-A-Day series.
Click here to learn more about MK.
Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018.
Maw was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. She is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 - 2018). Her full-length poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020), longlisted for the 2021 PEN America Open Book Award.
Maw often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and is a Spring 2021 ARC Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley.