Summer 2024 Virtual
Workshops
June 23 –29, 2024
Virtual Workshops on Zoom
2024 Cohorts Announced Below!
The pandemic lockdown allowed us to cultivate a new form of the VONA workshop, the Virtual Workshop for BIPOC writers. In these sessions, participants from around the globe will come together for a week-long workshop with faculty teaching in a variety of spaces and places. Join us as we continue to develop our global writing community.
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 generative 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 also 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.”
Prose Residency with
Jamie Figueroa
A residency
This prose residency is primarily comprised of individual conferences where the instructor gives specific, focused attention to one’s fiction or non-fiction. Conferences will provide direction for pages in progress (via supportive comments, questions, exercises, readings) to be engaged during the week. Daily check-ins as a group will encompass sharing about our writing process/writing practice and discussing key techniques critical to both genres. Regardless of a student’s focus, content or form, we will center our engagement around identity, place, ancestry and the necessity of being relational with our work on and off the page. Preliminary reading and writing will be required. This residency will be generative, and participants will also have the option to request a critique of a brief excerpt of their work.
Jamie Figueroa is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer (Catapult 2021), which was short-listed for the Reading the West Book Award and long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, was an Indie Next pick, a Good Morning America must-read book of the month, and was named a most anticipated debut of the year by Bustle, Electric Literature, The Millions, and Rumpus. A member of the faculty in the MFA Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Figueroa has published writing in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney’s, Agni, The New York Times, and the Boston Review, among other publications. A Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) alum, she received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar. Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio, Figueroa is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.
Prose Workshop with Christine Hyung-Oak Lee
A workshop
In this workshop, we will refine our prose manuscripts. What does this mean? I approach creative nonfiction from a literary perspective and utilize craft elements (e.g., metaphor, imagery, theme, character development) from fiction to inform narrative structure. (This is not the same as representing fiction as nonfiction, which is a no-go zone). At the same time, fiction, too, benefits from lived experiences and reverberates with particulars from the real world. We will spend time on elements of narrative structure and apply them to our work, which can be essays on a third-party subject, personal essays, memoirs, short stories, novels, or blended work. In other words: prose.
Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is a writer and the author of a memoir published by Ecco / HarperCollins, Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember, which was featured in Self Magazine, Time, The New York Times, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Her short stories and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, BuzzFeed, Guernica, and The New York Times. She is a VONA Alum. Christine's pronouns are they/she.
Young Adult
with Natalia Sylvester
A workshop
Writing YA, especially in a time when books for marginalized young adults are threatened, can be revolutionary in and of itself. In this workshop, we’ll dive into the why’s of writing stories for young adults who are in the process of becoming. We’ll study work that explores the seeming contradictions of adolescence—its fearlessness and vulnerability, fragility and strength, independence and powerlessness. Through workshop, craft talks and generative exercises, we’ll create a supportive, empowering environment to help us venture into the heart of our own stories, which are often not only written for teens, but for the teenage selves still within us.
Natalia Sylvester is the award-winning author of several novels for adults and young adults. CHASING THE SUN was named the Best Debut Book of 2014 by Latinidad and EVERYONE KNOWS YOU GO HOME won an International Latino Book Award and the 2018 Jesse H. Jones Award for Best WorkNatalia's debut YA novel, RUNNING, was a 2020 Junior Library Guild Selection, and her next novel for young adults, BREATHE AND COUNT BACK FROM TEN, was published by Clarion Books/HarperCollins in May 2022. A MALETA FULL OF TREASURES, Natalia's first picture book (illustrated by Juana Medina), will be published by Dial Books in 2024. Natalia's non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, Bustle, Catapult, Electric Literature, Latina magazine, and McSweeney's Publishing. Her essays have been anthologized in collections such as A MAP IS ONLY ONE STORY and A MEASURE OF BELONGING: WRITERS OF COLOR ON THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH. Born in Lima, Peru, Natalia came to the US at age four and grew up in Florida and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. She received a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami, was a 2021 Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and was formerly a faculty member at the Mile-High MFA program at Regis University.
This five-day poetry/hybrid workshop invites writers to look at structurally unique poetic devices that heavily lean on form as the epicenter of their poetic power. Together we will examine and craft six poetic poems while we close read and thoughtfully discuss text from contemporary poets: Cynthia Manick, Jane Wong, Safiya Sinclair, and Ada Limon and poet ancestors: June Jordan, James Baldwin, Lucile Clifton, Amiri Baraka and Gloria Evangalina Anzaldua. In addition to drafting new pieces daily, we will indulge in daily writing rituals which include two prompts per class, short affirmation and meditation and journaling. All text will be provided by the instructor.
Form as Resistance, Legacy and Code
with
Anastacia-Reneé
A workshop
Anastacia-Reneé is a queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, speaker, and podcaster. She is the author of (v.) (Gramma/Black Ocean, 2017); Forget It (Black Radish, 2017); Sidenotes from the Archivist (HarperCollins/Amistad, 2023); and Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere (HarperCollins/Amistad, 2024).
Sidenotes from the Archivist is a rich and beautiful collection of verse and image, a multi-part retrospective that traverses time, space, and reality to illuminate the expansiveness of Black femme lives. About the book, Douglas Kearney says, “Casting a sharp side-eye at the past with urgent syntax that rockets a reader forward, Anastacia-Reneé’s newest collection is a trenchant critique of US American f#@ckeries. This is a communal book in which unruly voices account for the dead; there are far too many to remember and more coming soon. Side Notes From the Archivist moves the margins to the center, retroactively claiming space and meaning to hold it into whatever future there is.”
Her work has been anthologized in: The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics and Superhero Poetry, Obsidian: Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora (Playground),Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, Furious Flower Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature, Joy Has A Sound, Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World, Spirited Stone: Lessons from Kubota’s Garden, and Seismic: Seattle City of Literature.
Reneé has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Ragdale, Mineral School, and The New Orleans Writers Residency. Her work has appeared in, BOMB, Prairie Schooner, Hobart, Foglifter, Auburn Avenue, Catapult, Alta, Torch, Poetry Northwest, A-Line, Cascadia Magazine, Hennepin Review, Ms. Magazine and others. They were selected by NBC News as part of the list of “Queer Artist of Color Dominate 2021’s Must See LGBTQ Art Shows.” Anastacia-Reneé was former Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019), Hugo House Poet-in-Residence (2015-2017), Arc Artist Fellow (2020), and Jack Straw Curator (2020).
She lives in New York City.
Once Upon a Midnight Sunrise: Writing Narrative Poems
with
Tim Seibles
A workshop
We often think of fiction as the realm of story and poetry as the realm of lyrical meditation, but poems can also tell stories. We all have memories of stuff that really happened—within our families, with our friends, with our romantic partners, and certainly to each of us alone. Of course, many of us also have the itch to tell tall tales or spin enhanced versions of life moments. In this workshop, we will read and listen to narrative poems by established poets, then carefully examine how they bring various events to life in a relatively short amount of space and time. We will then use prompts to write drafts of our own narrative poems. In addition to engaging several narrative strategies, we will take a closer look at how compression can energize the pulse and movement of a poem.
Born in Philadelphia in 1955, Tim Seibles is the author of seven collections of poetry, including his most recent, Voodoo Libretto (Etruscan Press, 2022), One Turn Around the Sun (Etruscan Press, 2017), and 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. Other titles are Buffalo Head Solos (2004), Hammerlock (1999), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992), and Body Moves (1988). Several questions drive the collection One Turn Around the Sun, the most central being how can a person stay sane when so often socio-political circumstances mock all efforts to create a livable world. Kwame Dawes says, “These are profoundly vulnerable poems that are distinguished by the risk and daring that we expect from our best poets. His alluring sensuality, and his splendid and welcoming humor will be wholly satisfied by this beautiful collection.” This book bolsters an ongoing engagement with life at a time when running away is a great temptation. Fast Animal is about the importance of remembering, the burden of race, and the meaning of true wakefulness. Publishers Weekly says, “Seibles’s refusal to sentimentalize family life or his own baser urges lends credibility to the more surreal rhetorical and metaphorical leaps, buoying the reader with him on history’s turbulent sea.” Reflecting on writing, Seibles says, “I think poetry, if it’s going to be really engaging and engaged, has to be able to come at the issues of our lives from all kinds of angles and all kinds of ways: loudly and quietly, angrily and soothingly, with comedy and with dead seriousness. Our lives are worth every risk, every manner of approach.” His poems has been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Seibles has received fellowships from both the Provincetown Fine Arts Center and The National Endowment for the Arts. He also won the Open Voice Award from the 63rd Street Y in New York City. On July 15, 2016, Seibles was named Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Terry McAuliffe. Seibles lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where he is a member of the English Department and MFA in writing faculty of Old Dominion University. He is a teaching board member of the Muse Writers Workshop.
Application fee: $30
Workshop Tuition: $1,000
Residency Tuition: $1,200
VONA Summer. Give yourself the gift of time and community. Honor your craft.