About this Event
Unearth what haunts you in this workshop geared towards helping you return to your authentic, experimental, poetic inner voice. How are we tied to the past—to history, time, and space? What is haunting, and how might it embody ideas of erasure, absence, suspension, and refusal? What’s made you into a ghost of your former self? Together we’ll consider what to do with the liminal, unruly, and spectral inheritances—the parts of the story, of us—that don’t fit neatly in time and space.
This workshop will center poetry, while also exploring creative non-fiction and theory. Using texts, short movement exercises, and writing prompts, we’ll begin to tease out the past that preoccupies and possesses our writing. Texts from writers such as Lucile Cliffton, Eve Tuck, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Fahima Ife, and Dionne Brand allow us to examine how history, haunting, and loss are contoured by race, gender, sexuality, queerness, diaspora, and colonialism, while writing exercises and peer-to-peer feedback will orient us towards a rich reframing of what it means to be alive, and to return to oneself.
Open to writers of all levels. This is a 2-week workshop, with a 2-hour session each week. Please prepare for approximately 1-2 hours of work between sessions which might include completing a few short readings and generating 2-3 pages of rough, drafted writing.
This 2-week workshop meets on Thursdays from 6-8pm at LitArts RI on the following dates:
Thurs, Dec 4
Thurs, Dec 11
About Your Teaching Artist
NAIMAH ZULMADELLE PÉTIGNY (she/her) is a Black feminist scholar, dancer, poet, and
abolitionist educator. She is an Assistant Professor of Literary Arts and Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design and holds the Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design. Naimah writes toward expansive, experimental notions of Blackness as she centers questions of gender, pastness, loss, and erotics. Her current book project considers how we might be lovingly adorned by loss, instead of anchored by it. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Commoning Ethnography, The Walker Art Center Magazine, Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges Journal, Routledge International Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies, and Cultural Studies.
Health Safety Guidelines
If you have tested positive for Covid-19 within a few days of attending an event at LitArts RI, please contact Staff so we can let others know of possible exposure. We ask that you wait 14 days or until testing negative to return to the Center.
Accessibility
LitArts RI is wheelchair accessible. The organization is actively committed to cultivating a community that values and reflects diversity, equity and inclusivity and to providing programming that is accessible to all attendees. Please let us know about any accommodations we can make to allow you to participate fully in this event.
This activity is made possible in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and by a Project Fund grant from Providence Art, Culture and Tourism.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
LitArts RI, 400 Harris Avenue, Providence, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 129.89
