Description
In this workshop, open to prose writers and poets of all ages and backgrounds, participants will use freewriting, revision, and in-depth feedback as tools to create work that can spark new writing possibilities or build on an existing project. The class will address these types of questions: How do we synthesize our experiences and histories with acts of imagination? How do we break silences and heal from trauma through storytelling? How do we write about intersections between race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other aspects of our identities in effective and nuanced ways? Participants will be encouraged to draw from personal, family, and cultural histories, in a supportive yet critically constructive writing environment.
NB: This recorded class is available to rent for two weeks through a private YouTube link. The link will be sent to the email you use to enroll (check your spam). Please email ask@writerscenter.org with questions.
Please note: this recording is for the renter’s email only. After purchase of rental, you will receive the link to the private YouTube video of the recorded class. You will have access to the class for two weeks. If you share this recording elsewhere, you may be excluded from being able to purchase other classes.
Brian Komei Dempster is an award-winning poet, editor, and teacher. His volumes of poetry, Seize (Four Way Books, 2020) and Topaz (Four Way Books, 2013), have received several honors, including the Julie Suk Award, an NCPA Gold Award in Poetry, and a Human Relations Indie Book Silver Winner award. He has taught creative writing to diverse groups; he edited two collections based on his classes, From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001), which received a Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society, and Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Heyday, 2011). Dempster is a professor of rhetoric and language and Director of Administration for the Master’s in Asia Pacific Studies program at the University of San Francisco, where he was a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award. In addition to teaching poetry workshops for the university, he is on faculty at the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference and has led classes for the Connecticut Poetry Society, Kearny Street Workshop, and Literary Arts.
