Summer 2025
Workshops & Residencies
June 22 - 28, 2025
Join us on Zoom
Somebody Done Walked Away With All My Stuff
Poetry Meets Theater: Writing the Choreopoem
We will closely read, discuss, excavate and “model” (to create new work), Audre Lorde’s Need: A Chorale for Black Women Voices, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues to create your own poetic monologues stitched together to draft a choreopoem. While we meticulously study the role of format and structure, the integral and intentional use of social justice issues, poetic cadence and BIPOC voices of choreopoems, with emphasis on Audre Lorde and Ntozake Shange, we’ll use Lorde’s, Shange’s and Ensler’s poetry, fiction, and, nonfiction as daily inspiration (through visual, text and musical writing prompts) to generate new writing rituals and poems as a foundation for choreopoems.
Anastacia-Reneé (She/They) is an award-winning queer writer, educator, interdisciplinary artist, playwright, TEDX speaker, and co-host of the Deep End With Friends podcast. She is the author of Here in the (Middle) Of Nowhere, Side Notes from the Archivist, selected as one of “NYPL Best Books of 2023,” and, “The American Library Associations (RUSA) “Notable Books of 2024.” (v.) and Forget It. Renee served as Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019) during Seattle’s inaugural year of UNESCO status. Her multi-genre work has been published or is forthcoming in BOMB, MS Magazine, Logic(s), Alta, Underbelly, Callaloo, Prairie Schooner and others.
Writing the Self Through Others:
The Ethics of First-Person Narrative
What do your friends and family think about your writing? Is it possible to write about people you care about without offending or hurting them? How can I tell the stories I need to tell without sacrificing my relationships? In my experience, these questions represent the most common concerns of writers at the beginning of the personal essay journey. In this workshop, we will confront these questions head on, discussing various approaches employed by nonfiction writers. Ultimately, though, this workshop is designed so that participants have a chance to compose their own positions on these questions. As writers of first-person narrative, we must be certain of our project, and that includes its ethical dimensions. Short readings, prompts, and exercises will enable us to explore fully the moral heart of the work that we do. Above all, this workshop is a “judgment free zone” where openness, honesty, and a delight in creative wildness are the only requirements.
Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio and received the 2020 LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. A 2024-2025 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont, and the 2024-2025 Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University.
Fiction Workshop
with Jennine Capó Crucet
In this five-day workshop, our own writing will serve as the foundation for discussions related to structure, voice, environment, and other elements of our work, so you’ll be asked to submit a manuscript in advance (no more than 20 pages of fiction). We will begin our time together by sharing and cultivating rituals that will establish our community and, eventually, sustain our writing practice far beyond the workshop (we will also co-create a reading list with this same aim in mind). We will play with several modes of providing feedback; each writer will choose the mode (or mix of modes) that they feel best supports their vision for their piece. Please come prepared to share your work aloud with the community. You can also expect specific feedback on your manuscript during both our workshop time and a one-on-one conference with me.
Jennine Capó Crucet (she/her/ella) is a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. A Kirkus Prize Finalist, a recipient of a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, she’s the author of the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, which won the International Latino Book Award and has been selected as a community read at over 40 U.S. academic institutions; the multiple award-winning story collection How to Leave Hialeah; and the essay collection My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, which was long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award. Her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized, and her work has appeared on PBS NewsHour, NPR, and in publications such as the Atlantic, Condé Nast Traveler, and others. Her fourth book, the critically-acclaimed novel Say Hello to My Little Friend, described as Scarface meets Moby Dick, was recently published by Simon & Schuster.
Memory & Imagination:
The Art of Writing Nonfiction and Memoir
How do we craft the truth and ensure that it reads like compelling fiction, without resorting to making up things? How do we heighten reality? And how do we ensure that our true stories have resonance beyond our own lives? By using our memories to fuel our imaginations. Memoir relies on memory, but as Toni Morrison described it, the act of imagination is bound up with “emotional memory – what the nerves and skin remember, as well as how it appeared.” In this workshop, we’ll free ourselves to conjure emotional memory, and through a series of exercises, imbue it with drama, meaning and narrative drive.
Bridgett M. Davis is author of the memoir, Love, Rita, published by Harper Books in spring 2025. Her memoir, The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life In The Detroit Numbers, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book, named a Best Book of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews, BuzzFeed, NBC News and Parade Magazine, and featured as a clue on the quiz show Jeopardy! The upcoming film adaptation will be produced by Plan B Entertainment and released by Searchlight Pictures. She is author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow and Shifting Through Neutral. She is also writer/director of the 1996 feature film Naked Acts, newly restored by Milestone Films and released to critical acclaim, screening in theaters across the US and abroad. Davis is Professor Emerita in the journalism department at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she taught creative, narrative and film writing.
Small Wonders: The Prose Poem and Its Packages
In this generative workshop, we will look at the Prose Poem. Often, people suggest that writing prose poems is liberating, but what exactly does that mean? Does the lack of line breaks serve a purpose or is it arbitrary for some prose poems? Does the shortness of the prose put a strain on the possibility of a narrative? Can a subject be fully explored in such short bursts? What is gained or lost with the addition of line breaks? The workshop will, further, be a combination of reading and writing to redefine, reexamine, and reevaluate the nature of the prose poem.
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, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is published by Liveright Press (2023), was the winner of the 2023 New England Book Award for Poetry, and was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award. With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, 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.
Prose Residency
with Jamie Figueroa
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.
In order to disrupt internalized thinking, as well as limited patterns of creativity and imagination influenced by ongoing colonization (and its subheadings—patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, misogyny, racism, colorism, sexism, ableism, homophobia and other expressions of bias and hatred), I would like to root us in our relationships. The many ways in which we can choose to be more relational. How does your writing relate to you? How is this project engaging and working you as you engage and work it? What are the ways in which you offer up yourself— your gratitude and receptivity, your willingness to learn, to be altered, to be ultimately transformed? If our writing is not solely something we do to create a product to take to marketplace, but a living presence that is ever changing and changing us, how does this alter our orientation with it? We are in a state of being and becoming, together.
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.
Jamie Figueroa is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, which “brims with spellbinding prose, magical elements, and wounded, full-hearted characters that nearly jump off the page” (Publishers Weekly). Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer was longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and shortlisted for Reading the West Debut Fiction. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Boston Review, Elle, McSweeney’s and Kweli Journal among others. Figueroa’s memoir in essays, Mother Island, received a starred Kirkus review and was named among the LA Times “6 books to shake off colonialism and rethink our Latino stories.” In addition, Mother Island has been included in the “most anticipated” and “best non-fiction books of 2024” lists by SheReads, Ms. Magazine, Elle, and Hispanic Executive. Figueroa is Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio and is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico.
Fiction has the power to resist oppression and rewrite cultural narratives. This seminar will empower writers to tackle themes of colonization, diaspora, and cultural heritage by exploring how to use storytelling as a form of resistance. In this course, participants will analyze craft techniques such as voice, perspective, and symbolism to tell stories that confront historical inaccuracies and illuminate overlooked truths. Writers will leave the course with a portfolio of story ideas or drafts that speak to their personal and cultural experiences while challenging systems of power.
Fiction as Resistance : Writing Against the Grain
Fabienne Josaphat is the author of Kingdom of No Tomorrow, winner of the 2023 PEN Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and longlisted for the 2025 Aspen Words Literary Prize. Of this novel, Barbara Kingsolver, Pulitzer Prize winner of Demon Copperhead, says, "This beautifully convincing slice of history is powered not just by good research, but by lots of suspense, compelling characters, and understated political themes that broke my heart because of how timely they remain. Kingdom of No Tomorrow will bring the fierce vision of the Black Panthers to new generations of readers, adding some stunning context to the modern Black Lives Matter movement." Josaphat's first novel, Dancing in the Baron’s Shadow, was published by Unnamed Press. Other publications include The Washington Post and Teen Vogue, and her essay, Summer is an Empty House, made the Notable Essays mentions in Best American Essays 2016. Her work has been anthologized in Eight Miami Poets, Off Shore Poets, and So Spoke the Earth. She is currently at work on a third novel.
The Heart Never Rests: Writing Lyric Poetry
Lyric: 2) a poem rooted in the writer’s emotions
Almost always, we write poems because a feeling has driven us to say something. It seems we can’t help but lead with our hearts. Given this, it’s clear that all poems—narrative, pastoral, political—have lyrical aspects. The emotions fueling the words may be gentle or volcanic, but most often, we write to express exactly how we feel about an idea or event that affects our lives. As poets, however, we want to find language that compels others to feel with us, words that speak meaningfully to the reader. We’ve all been gripped by poems written by someone we’ve never met, sometimes by poems written centuries before we were born.
But how is it done? How can we write poems that touch someone whose life may be utterly separate from our own? In this five-day workshop, we will read emotively rich poems and, using writing prompts, we’ll develop some useful knowledge about how such poems are written. Come ready to read, read aloud, think hard, and write.
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, 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). His poems have 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. Applications close on February 28.