Summer
Workshop
Session 1
In-Person Workshops held in Miami
June 25th-
July 1, 2023
VONA is excited to return to our traditional in-person workshops held in Miami. Our nationally and internationally renowned faculty will be on campus and working intensively with our participants.
Writing the Obsession—Finding & Sustaining Momentum in Poetic Sequences & Series with Oliver de la Paz
A Residency
From invention to revision, this generative workshop will attend to the possibilities of creating new work that is in-tune with a singular focus, obsession, or motif. We will explore exercises that allow the writer to hold on to a subject matter, allowing the writer to seek new possibilities, and perhaps provide outlets to future projects and poems. We’ll explore models of poems and hybrid works by authors that endure, sustain, and focus an idea or theme. And we’ll look to shortcuts and practices that will aid in the continued generation of other mixes and remixes.
Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is forthcoming from Liveright Press in 2023. A founding member, Oliver serves as the co- chair of the Kundiman advisory board. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
Politics as Usual: Writing the Political as the Particular with Nicole Shawan Junior
A workshop
This workshop centers creative nonfiction that explores the overt, covert and nuanced ways in which our bodies and breath are political acts of resilience framed by and moving against oppressive systems // structures // people that // who seek to annihilate us. In Politics As Usual, writers will workshop their works-in-progress. We will explore how to excavate and extend setting, character, structure, and voice as physicalizations of the political on the page. While this workshop's primary technology will be the use of peer feedback, we will also lean into Afrikan ancestral technologies that have less to do with the physical act of developing our manuscripts and more to do with the spiritual act of fortifying our commitment to the work.
"Y'all feel a nigga's struggle, y'all think a nigga love to hustle behind the wheel, tryin' to escape my trouble. Kids stop they greetin' me. I'm talkin' sweet to keys.Cursin' the very God, that bought this grief to be." —Jay Z, "Politics As Usual"
Nicole Shawan Junior (they/them) was bred in the bass-heavy beat and scratch of Brooklyn, where the cool of inner-city life barely survived crack cocaine’s burn. Their work appears in Oprah Daily, Guernica, Zora, Gay Mag, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. Their literary art has received support from Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Hurston/Wright Writers Week, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, V.O.N.A., and others. Nicole is the founder of Roots. Wounds. Words.—a literary arts revolution that serves BIPOC storytellers. Nicole curated Raising Mothers' limited Justice Involved Mothers column, which was penned by formerly incarcerated Black women.
Pitbull or Poodle: Tone and Its Affects in Poetry with Tim Seibles
A workshop
Too often, tone is ignored or thought to be secondary to the life of a poem, but tone affects the way a reader (or listener) receives the words and, consequently, has a lot to do with how a poem means. In becoming more conscious of tone as a vehicle for both emotions and ideas, we become more capable of creating resonant work. In this workshop we will examine poems by established authors that employ a variety of tones and, with prompts, participants will generate related new works.
Tim Seibles is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), Hammerlock(1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award, and One Turn Around The Sun (2017). His latest work of poetry, Voodoo Libretto, was published by Etruscan Press in 2022. His poems have appeared in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, including Best American Poetry. Seibles lives in Norfolk, Virginia.
Playing With Form in Fiction with Deesha Philyaw
A workshop
Serious writers are playful writers! The writing life demands resilience, but sometimes writers find themselves unsure of how to keep moving forward through a story, or through the concerns that loom large in the world beyond our keyboards. One solution: Play! Through readings and writing exercises, we’ll uncover who our characters are and what their stories are about, as we experiment with forms such as a letter to the editor, a set of school recess rules, a packing list, an invoice, a recipe, and an employee handbook. This is a generative workshop with a focus on discovery rather than critique
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and the 2022-2023John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi.
Contemporary Humor Writing with
Damon Young
A workshop
Humor, depending on its intended function, illuminates, interrogates, alleviates, and exacerbates. It’s paramount to memory, self-discovery, and our ability to process and synthesize feelings and information. But why? What does it do for us? What does it do to us? What compels us to create it? Or is it a self-created entity--a happenstance we just decide, with intent (or on a whim), to notice and attempt to articulate? This workshop will explore these questions and more, through a thorough deconstruction of what makes something funny, on the page, today--with sample essays and self-generated examples--and tutorials on writing a funny line, a funny paragraph, and a funny story, and disentangling the triflin' compulsion to remove humor from a serious one. This workshop is for nonfiction and fiction writers.
Damon Young is the author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays--a tragicomic exploration of the angsts, anxieties, and absurdities of existing while Black in America, and the winner of Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award.
He is the co-founder of the culture blog VerySmartBrothas and was a contributing columnist for The Washington Post Magazine, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and a columnist for GQ. He has written for the Atlantic, Esquire, NY Mag, The Undefeated, Ebony, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Currently, Damon is the creator and host of a podcast with Crooked Media, “Stuck with Damon Young.”