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Together we will write about our names and honor all of the ways that names, and the act of naming, is fundamentally sacred in understanding the origin story of the self. This is a meditative writing workshop in which we will write mas poesia de fuerza that aims to individually and collectively claim AND reclaim our names, therefore the living breathing spirit that is you. That is us. We will also touch upon and discuss the colonial, historical practice of the erasure of cultural names as a means of imperial domination and product of capitalism. Yes, we will celebrate and exalt our names, pero we will also unpack the perpetuated violence that has been/is enacted by the Western world in naming/renaming populations of Indigenous/People of Color under the guise of exploration, settler colonialism, acculturation, and assimilation. Will you join me in this writing journey?

In this workshop, participants will focus on the significance of place in poetry. Place may be defined as a geographical location, an internal state, or perhaps a poetic meeting of the two. We will read and respond to several poems of place, eventually developing our own place poem and finding our way. The only experience necessary to participate in this workshop is to have been somewhere.

This pandemic has prompted a lot of pandemic themed journals, pandemic themed readings, pandemic themed writing; this pandemic has produced a lot of forgettable pandemic poems. Maybe it’s because a pandemic is big. It’s a big prompt. In this workshop we’ll try to work small. We’ll look at small memorable pieces produced during big historical moments before time allowed the moments to be understood. We’ll try small prompts and hopefully produce some small but memorable pieces.