Description: Join Reading Queer & Lutze Segu for a Zoom-based creative writing workshop that re-imagines queer futures through the lens of crisis, social justice, and resilience. This generative writing workshop is open to the community and allies, as well as writers, thinkers and scholars.
About Lutze Segu: I am a first-generation Haitian-American who was born and raised in Miami, FL which is the ancestral and traditional lands of the Seminole, Miccosukee, and Tequesta nations. My parents are fugees who fled the island of Haiti in the 80s looking for a life that had more dignity and opportunity. I am the proud product of the Miami-Dade County Public School System and graduate of Florida Memorial University the only HBCU (Historically Black College/University) in Miami. My different roles as an activist, social worker, organizer, and racial justice facilitator have all collided in a beautiful role I am now describing as a social justice doula. I am currently a doctoral student in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada where I study Gender, Race Sexuality, and Social Justice.
I have been theorizing on the internet for the past 10 years as a public intellectual and cultural critic on issues concerning race and feminism @FeministGriote on Twitter. Griot is a West African term for a storyteller. I create space for people to tell their stories and hear the stories of others so that they can be transformed. Social justice is my civic spiritual practice.
All Reading Queer events & workshops foster a community and culture of inclusion. Our events & workshops are open to the public regardless of one’s ability to pay, sexual orientation, gender, race and/or any other form of identification. However, all of our events are safe spaces for all queer-identified people and are designed to address the writerly needs of marginalized communities who have traditionally been denied a voice. We count on your donations to keep our events & workshops accessible to the public. Please support our mission with a donation upon sign up.
Reading Queer Presents “Anything Else Under Heave: A Writing Workshop” with poet Mia S. Willis
Description: Poetry frequently offers glimpses of Black and queer joy in times of societal turmoil and uncertainty. As Black creators become increasingly essential to local and national movements for change, participants in this workshop will encounter the bop poetry form created by Afaa Michael Weaver at the Cave Canem Foundation Retreat in 1997. Attendees will be guided through formal analyses of notable bop poems before conducting their own session-exclusive experiments so as to render both grief and joy in their respective complexities.
Mia S. Willis is a Black performance poet from Charlotte, North Carolina. Their work has been featured in Homology Lit, The New Southern Fugitives, Narrative Northeast, Recenter Press Poetry Journal, Slamfind, and others. In 2019, Mia was named the first two-time Capturing Fire Slam Champion, a Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, the Young Artist Fellow at Chashama’s ChaNorth residency, a collaborator in Forward Together’s Transgender Day of Resilience Art Project, and a performing artist on RADAR Productions’ Sister Spit 2020 Tour. Their debut poetry collection, monster house., was the 2018 winner of the Cave Canem Foundation’s Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize and is available with Jai-Alai Books. Connect with Mia on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram (@poetinthehat).
Description: We will look at Shuntaro Tanikawa’s poem, Growth, as a way to jump start the flow of our chronological life moments of fear and courage. We will share our personal stories and create a timeline of our up against the wall moments and victories. We will use improvisation and connect with each other through mirrored movements and exploring secrets in a safe and nurturing environment, we will share our memories in “story nuggets” or “story-haiku” and empower ourselves through the spoken word. All levels welcome.
Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam and later taking top prizes in three National Poetry Slams. Television credits include 2 seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, NPR’s Snap Judgement, TEDx Talk& MTV’s Free Your Mind. His work appears in Poetry, American Academy of Poets, Pine Hills Review & Beltway Poetry Quarterly, among others. He is the recipient of several fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts and The DC Commission for the Arts. As a theater artist he received three New York Innovative Theater Award Nominations for his work in Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind with a win for Best Performance Art Production The Kenyon Review recently named Regie Cabico the “Lady Gaga of Poetry” and he has been listed in BUST magazine’s 100 Men We Love. Mr. Cabico is the publisher and founder of Capturing Fire Press and Slam and co-founder of Split This Rock in Washington, DC.
MDC Live Arts and Reading Queer present a webinar with Miccosukee artist and activist Houston Cypress on writing a Land Acknowledgement.
Click here to register for free and receive a link to the Webinar: Zoom Link.
Land Acknowledgements are formal statements and public rituals that recognize and respect Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards of this land and the enduring relationship that exists between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories. This FREE and dynamic webinar will inspire action through the arts, teaching participants the ins and outs of drafting their own public ceremonies, or Land Acknowledgements, using the poetry of Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier and other indigenous writers, as well as USDAC resources, the careful scrutiny of existing federal legislation, and the solace found in a guided group meditation. The webinar is designed with the intention of disrupting the power dynamic, finding Truth and Reconciliation, and inspiring action through the arts.
Queer Your Subversion! Transform Your Writing Practice with the Help of Queer Models
DATE: May 16th @ 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time.LOCATION: This is now a virtual workshop. Join us at Zoom.us.
** Please note Zoom ID Code correction for the workshop today. New Personal ID is 394 819 3467 & Password 191054. The workshop will be held @ zoom.us. and it’s open to everyone. Click “join a meeting” and enter Personal ID Code 394 819 3467.
Description: Queer writing is resistance writing & by necessity experimental in style. Queer identity is the future of gender: non-binary, non-normative, & non assimilative. The patriarchy has no space for us—no language, no morality, no gods, no pedagogy— therefore we are creating our own by subverting the symbols & referents of patriarchy to create, affirm, and protect our own values.
Queer Masculinities will be introduced by focusing on Ginsberg’s Howl & Burroughs’ Naked Lunch fragments. Howl shows writing as politics. Ginsberg was the Walt Whitman of the Cold War era. This anti-formalist beat and jazz anti-war political poem was written at a time when sodomy was a crime. Naked Lunch answers to the political rally cry by subverting the cut-up decoupage method for queer practice. Both Ginsberg & Burroughs were my creative writing teachers at Naropa, though Burroughs briefly since he was a visiting professor. I understood how their queer identity affected their avant-garde writing practice as well as their politics. Today, LGBT folx forget that queer politics, i.e. non homo-normative, anti-assimiliation attitudes, are central to a queer identity that resists a ‘passing for.’ We will sample and experience these texts together and generate your own writing using mother lines from these texts.
Facilitator: Eve Eurydice
Hailing from Lesbos, Greece, Eurydice is a multimedia artist, podcaster, journalist, educator, single Mom, & the author of 3 books & numerous stories & articles. She is currently at work on a memoir titled The Lesbian that tells the story of Lesbian women–a genealogy that spans from Sappho to her great grandmother to her grandmother to her mother to her–& of our Lesbian language; on a nonfiction book titled Speak Sex to Power; & on a novel retelling the story of Eurydice in her own words.
Eurydice received a BA from Bard College, where she studied with Roy Lichtenstein & Robert Kelly; an MA in creative writing from the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she studied with Ron Sukenick & also studied at Naropa Institute with Allen Ginsberg & William Burroughs; an MA in Comparative Literature & an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University, where she studied with Robert Coover & she later taught as an assistant professor.
She published books with Scribner (Satyricon USA: A Journey Across the New Sexual Frontier. New York, London, Sydney, Singapore, 2000), Virago Press (f/32: The Second Coming. London, New York: 1993), Richard Kasak (f/32 Revisited), the Fiction Collective (f/32). Her writing has been widely translated, taught, reviewed.
Join Reading Queer, Clayre Benzadón & Caitlin Andrews for “Breaking Binaries”, a writing workshop that celebrates queer possibilities.
Breaking Binaries explores the concept of queerness as its own form of writing though a surrealist lens. Through a number of prompts and readings, we will lead participants through the numerous ways in which queering form, the hybridization of form, and cross-genre overlaps can bring about the visibility of queer bodies, thought, and existence in the world. We will focus on concepts of space, time, and accessibility: literally and metaphorically, on the page and beyond. Through this disruption of form, together, we will craft a community space that challenges norms and resists definition.
Date:February 15th, 2020 from 12:00 AM – 2:00 PM Mentors:Clayre Benzadón & Caitlin Andrews Location: University of Miami | Richter Library, University of Miami, Flex Space B @ 1300 Memorial Drive | Coral Gables, FL 33145. Map it here.
All Reading Queercreative writing workshops are open to writers at all levels and free. We welcome the LGBTQ community + allies.
Clayre Benzadón is currently a second-year MFA student at the University of Miami and Broadsided Press’s Instagram editor. Her chapbook, “Liminal Zenith”, is forthcoming from SurVision Books in the summer of 2020. She was recently awarded the 2019 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize for her poem “Linguistic Rewilding” and has also been previously published by The Acentos Review, Hobart, QA Poetry, SERIAL Magazine, HerStry, Poetry Breakfast, and other places.
Caitlin Andrews (she/her/hers) is from Baltimore, Maryland. She was listed as a finalist for the 2019 Marianne Russo Award for a Novel-in-Progress and has secured fellowships from the Chesapeake Writers’ Conference. Her work is forthcoming in The New Limestone Review and has appeared in Q&A Poetry. She is fully-funded at the University of Miami, where she is obtaining an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Fiction. Caitlin is also an illustrator, hiker, and an Irish-history enthusiast.