IWL Summer Sessions provides an opportunity for students to work with experienced teaching artists in poetry and prose in two 4-week sessions during July and August. Applicants can apply for one or both sessions.

Individual Class: $275 | Both Classes: $450

for additional questions or requests please email education@kearnystreet.org

Register

Session 1: Prose with Tara Dorabji

Class Times (ONLINE): Tuesdays 6-8pm | July 14, 21, 28, Aug 4

Course Description: The Power of Voice: A generative workshop exploring the power of voice in fiction and narrative nonfiction. Participants will have opportunities to generate material on themes of love, loss, culture and relationships and build their craft skills through discussion and practices of resonance. The workshop builds on power building frameworks, exploring the workshop throughline: How can storytelling advance cultural sovereignty and transform worldviews?

Instructor Bio: Tara Dorabji is the award-winning author of the novel, Call Her Freedom, Simon and Schuster’s Books Like Us Grand Prize Winner. Tara’s documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA. Her publications include Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, Huizache, People.com and acclaimed anthologies: Good Girls Marry Doctors & All the Women in My Family Sing. The daughter of Parsi-Indian and German-Italian migrants, she lives in Northern California with her rabbit.

Session 2: Poetry with Jade Cho

Class Times (ONLINE): Wednesdays 6-8pm | Aug 12, 19, 26, Sep 2

Course Description: From Archive to Action: Poetry as Political Imagination: In this four-week generative workshop we will explore the tools poetry offers for writing the personal and political. Guided by work from poets such as June Jordan, Martín Espada, Etel Adnan, Zaina Alsous, and Diana Khoi Nguyen, we will experiment with language and form, finding our own shapes for excavating the self, ancestors, history, and imaginings towards more just futures. Participants will generate new work weekly, developing their own creative practice around personal, familial, and/or communal artifacts, and share writing for feedback in the last two class sessions. This space is collaborative in nature; come ready to share and shape our workshop together!

Instructor Bio: Jade Cho is from Oakland, California. A 2022-2024 Stegner Fellow at Stanford and 2025 finalist for the National Poetry Series, her work appears or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley, where she studied and taught in Poetry for the People, and an MFA from Arizona State University, where she served as a June Jordan Teaching Fellow. A grandchild of immigrants from Hoisan (Toisan/Taishan), she is working on a book tracing memory, grief, and desire through the archive of Chinese Exclusion and the Chinese Confession Program. She has taught writing in university, K-12, and community settings for over a decade and is a proud IWL alum.