In this generative hybrid workshop, you will work with an emotional moment that is begging for a bespoke narrative structure, because the story of it needs you to innovate, needs what poetry offers: freedom from causality, a focus on image and rhythm, and permission to lineate sentences that mirror various states of feeling and being.

 

This workshop will include contemplative exercises, short readings, and a series of writing prompts that activate different narrative modes and registers of voice, and encourage weaving various source materials with a poetic sensibility.

Arisa White is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College. She is the author of Who’s Your Daddy, co-editor of Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart, and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice Series for young readers.

Arisa's poetry is widely published and her collections have been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, Lambda Literary Award, and has won the Per Diem Poetry Prize, Maine Literary Award, Nautilus Book Award, and an Independent Publisher Book Award.

As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates poetic collaborations that are rooted in Black queer women’s ways of knowing. She is a Cave Canem fellow and serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press, as well as the Community Advisory Board for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Arisa is currently working on an Afro-speculative opera, set between the material and spiritual worlds, where three females’ lives intersect because of a murder-suicide. Post Pardon: The Opera, in development with composer Jessica Jones, is a transgenerational apology.

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Click here to learn more about Arisa.