In this workshop, creative powerhouses Je’Vel and YawnyBlew will explore how songwriting can be another tool to tell one’s truth. Whether you write poems, essays, fiction, or journal entries, music can help you express emotion, set tone, and connect with people in new ways.
In this session, we’ll discuss how to use a character’s associations with their environment to build a compelling sense of place in your story. We’ll also explore the reverse: the ways a sense of place can help create dynamic characters.
Join us on Tuesday, August 19, from 4:45–6:00 PM ET for Navigating the MFA Experience, a College Chat featuring poets, fiction writers, and screenwriters Nicole Caplain Kelly, Christine Singleton, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Sheena Daree Romero, Marya Cohn, and Jessie Keyt, who will share insights from their MFA journeys, followed by breakout discussions and a Q&A session.
This session will focus on fine tuning personal essay hooks and beginning opening paragraphs for college applicants. For MFA candidates, we will facilitate choosing portfolio pieces that connect with their chosen theme.
Whether you’re WordPress savvy or looking to learn more about online editorial systems, this group offers opportunities to dive into editorial tasks, outreach, and the publication of Girls Write Now Stories.
This session will focus on the half-way point of the summer mentorship cycle and what we are noticing in our pairs. What’s working? What would we like to improve? How are we tracking for any of the pair goals in this cycle?
In this session, we’ll explore food as a means of survival, safety, and gratitude, tracing its journey from soil to plate as a product of care and labor. We’ll begin with a brief gratitude prayer, read poems by Naomi Shihab Nye and January Gill O’Neil, and close with a fun writing exercise and sharing circle.
Join author and cultural critic, Kaila Yu, as she guides participants through how memoir and opinion writing can be used as tools of resistance, reflection, and reclamation. Drawing from her upcoming memoir Fetishized: A Reckoning with Yellow Fever, Feminism, and Beauty, Kaila will share how writing personal narratives can dismantle stereotypes, challenge the gaze, and give voice to long-silenced truths.
What radicalized you? What moment instilled in you the need to become more involved in your local community? In this IVDEIB session, we’ll listen to a panel and discuss our current political moment.
In this session, learn how to use an A to Z structure to write a creative nonfiction essay. Exploring this structure can help you write about difficult topics or simply be a fun way to look at a theme from different angles.
