February 4, 2021
A Note from Our Editor-in-Chief
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GOOD TROUBLE IN GOOD COMPANY |
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February reminds us that our history is always present. As some white supremacists grow louder and more violent, others slink back into the shadows, feeling the turn of the tide. It is a familiar ebb and flow. Familiar, too, is the way we find strength and comfort in making good trouble in good company.
‟For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.” - Audre Lorde
We are thrilled to offer several upcoming opportunities to gather, to learn and to write. Please join us.
Always,
Laura Pegram
Editor-in-Chief
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The Art of the Essay with Cinelle Barnes
February 17 - March 24, 2021, 6:30-7:30pm
Places have pulse and memory. Places breathe and shift. More than just a site or setting, a place often takes the shape of a character: taking significant, often shifting, space in our knowledge of self. Whether writing about a house, a street, a city, a region, or a country, a sense of place is central to constructing (and deconstructing) a sense of identity in personal narrative.
This six-week course is intended for nonfiction writers of all levels seeking to begin or complete essays or memoirs that explore their relationship with a physical environment. Studying Joan Didion's California, Alexander Chee's New York, and essays from A Measure of Belonging: 21 Writers of Color on the New American South (Kiese Laymon's Mississippi, Joy Priest's Kentucky, Latria Graham's South Carolina, Natalia Sylvester's map of borders and bodies, Diana Cejas' tobacco farm, Toni Jensen's classroom, and the instructor's now-notorious home), we will draw from various forms, techniques, angles, and approaches to writing about place. Each week, we will look at select passages from two to three writers, take prompts from their oeuvre to generate new work or revise projects in progress, and learn to look at place as an extension of our persons.
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Layers of Revision with Nadia Owusu
Saturday, February 27, 2021; 2:00-5:00pm
Toni Morrison said, “If you know how to read your own work—that is, with the necessary critical distance—it makes you a better writer and editor …read it as though it is the first time you’ve ever seen it. Critique it that way. Don’t get all involved in your thrilling sentences and all that.”
Often, it is through revision that we discover our story, that we understand what we are trying to say.
Approaching revision through a layered process can help us both to create distance from our drafts and to be intentional about the way we read them.
In this class, writers will bring a short excerpt of their work and, together, we will go through a layered revision process, paying attention to elements such as sensory detail, eliminating unnecessary words, the balance of summary and scene, and strengthening voice and point of view.
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Finding Our Stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Sunday, April 25th, 2:00-5:00pm
James Baldwin once told The Paris Review that writers need, most of all, endurance. During this time in our lives, creating art and devoting time to our writing is harder than ever. Writers’ block seems to be the norm, as the world around us competes for our attention, pulling us away from our inner selves and into the collective stream. This master class is intended for writers who wish to cultivate practices of inspiration in their daily lives. Through step-by-step writing prompts, goal-setting exercises, and discussions surrounding published authors and their notions of creativity and inspiration, from Elizabeth Gilbert to Toni Morrison, we will focus on ways to find inspiration for short pieces to long-term projects and everything in between. Students will leave class with new tools on how to activate their endurance through harnessing the power of inspiration.
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UPCOMING EVENTS
Tuesday, February 9th, 7:30-8:30pm
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‟Brandon Hobson has given us a haunted work, full of voices old and new. It is about a family’s reckoning with loss and injustice, and it is about a people trying for the same. The journey of this family’s way home is full—in equal measure—of melancholy and love. The Removed is spirited, droll, and as quietly devastating as rain lifting from earth to sky.”—TOMMY ORANGE
Join us for a Kweli reading and conversation on Tuesday, February 9th: Brandon Hobson on The Removed with Santee Frazier
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WRITERS AND BOOKS
Free Readings & Conversations
Ama Codjoe: Blood of the Air - Thursday, February 11, 7:30-8:10pm
Athena Dixon: The Incredible Shrinking Woman - Thursday, March 4, 7:30-8:10pm
Mary Frances Winter: Black Fatigue, How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body & Spirit - Thursday, March 18, 7:30-8:10pm
Hanif Abdurraqib: A Fortune For Your Disaster -Thursday, April 15, 7:30-8:10pm
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Tuesday 2/9 - Monday 3/8
PEN America invites you to join us for the winter 2021 season of PEN Out Loud, as together we turn to literature to engage our minds, reflect, and reconnect with ourselves.
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Kweli means “truth.” As a nonprofit literary magazine, our mission has been to seek out the work of BIPOC writers that “sing the truth.” From our triannual online journal, webinar workshops, year-long fellowships, public readings, individualized editing, annual writers' conference and international festival, Kweli invests in the artistic and professional growth of emerging authors, nationally and internationally, and seeks to address the under-representation of writers identifying as women. If our work resonates with you, we hope you will consider a donation.
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