IWL Summer Sessions provides an opportunity for students to work with experienced teaching artists in poetry and prose in two 4-week sessions during January-March. Applicants can apply for one or both sessions.
Individual Class: $275 | Both Classes: $450 (discount will be applied when you register for the second class)
for additional questions or requests please email education@kearnystreet.org
Session 1: Poetry with Lehua Taitano
Class Times (ONLINE): Wednesdays 6-8pm | Jan 21, Jan 28, Feb 4, Feb 11
Course Description: Pasifika Poetics & Creative Practice is a four-week, generative poetry workshop inspired by Pacific Islander literature and Indigenous ways of knowing. Each session will provide opportunities to engage with work by contemporary Pacific Islander poets—writers who explore ancestry, migration, queerness, futurity, and the sacred relationship between people and place—and then create new writing of your own. Together, we’ll experiment with form, play with language, and explore the vastness of expression and poetic form in contemporary Pasifika poetry. Come talk story and discover the ways your creative practice can act as a tool for mapping, archiving memory, and creating opportunities for collaboration.
Instructor Bio: Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of the art collective Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. Her poetry, essays, and Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction have been published internationally, and includes two books of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones—and many chapbooks of poetry, short fiction, and visual art, including Sonoma, Capacity, and appalachiapacific, which won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. Taitano has received fellowship support from Submittable and The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. She has served as poetry faculty for the Kundiman Writers’ Retreat and as a Curatorial Council member for Yerba Buena Center for the Art's Triennial exhibition of contemporary art. She is the current Program and Community Manager at Kearny Street Workshop, where she coordinates APAture, an annual festival of Pacific Islander and Asian American art. Taitano's work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.
Session 2: Creative Non-Fiction TBA Soon
Class Times (ONLINE): Wednesdays 6-8pm | Feb 18, Feb 25, Mar 4, Mar 11
Course Description: (coming soon)
Instructor Bio: (coming soon)