Workshop Description: This workshop is for the LGBTQ community and allies.The term “lyric essay” as a branch of creative nonfiction was coined by Deborah Tall in 1997, but examples of this capacious, hybrid literary form date back centuries—always resisting easy classification and answering to many names. In this workshop, we’ll explore the lyric essay as a genre of wish and risk using (as a guide) texts by four contemporary queer practitioners: Chen Chen, Bernard Cooper, Jaquira Diaz, and Dawn Lundy Martin. As we read together, we’ll identify the invitations, permissions, and prompts these lyric essayists have extended to us and begin writing under their influence. Participants who choose will also have the opportunity to share.
About Julie Marie Wade: Julie is the author of 16 collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid forms, most recently Skirted: Poems (The Word Works, 2021) and Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (The Ohio State University Press, 2020). With Denise Duhamel, she wrote The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019) and with Brenda Miller, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices (Cleveland State University Press, 2021). A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, she teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University. Her forthcoming projects are Meditation 40: The Honesty Room (Pank Books, 2023), Fugue: An Aural History (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2023), and Otherwise: Essays (Autumn House, 2023), chosen by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2022 Autumn House Nonfiction Book Prize.