Disrupting Shape & Molding Form: Exploring Untraditional Essay Forms Led By Nicole Shawan Junior
Mondays, May 9th - June 6th, 2022 | 7 PM ET - 8:30 PM ET
Tuition | $0.00
Capacity: 33 Storytellers
This 4-week workshop, “Disrupting Shape & Molding Form: Exploring Untraditional Essay Forms,” is a creative nonfiction literary container wherein participants will learn about, explore, and craft narrative nonfiction such as the braided essay, the hermit crab essay, and the collage essay. Participants will braid together connected narrative strands, use found forms in novel ways that retain the semantic resonance of the original, and piece together literary fragments that are seemingly unconnected. In this workshop, we will move beyond the traditional essay to craft compelling personal narratives that excite, explore, and disrupt.
About the Faculty: Nicole Shawan Junior (they/them) is a counter-storyteller who was bred in the bass-heavy beat and scratch of Brooklyn, where the cool of inner-city life barely survived crack cocaine’s burn. Their work appears or is forthcoming in What Is a Criminal? (Routledge 2023), The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket 2022), Emerge (Lambda Literary 2020), Guernica, The Rumpus, SLICE Magazine, Kweli Journal, CURA: A Literary Magazine of Art & Action, Gay Mag, ZORA, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. Nicole has received residencies and fellowships from Tin House, Hedgebrook, PERIPLUS, New York Foundation for the Arts, Lambda Literary, the San Francisco Public Library’s James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center, and more. Their literary art has received support from Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Hurston/Wright Writers Week, Tin House Summer Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, V.O.N.A., Carnegie Hall, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and others. Nicole is the founder of Roots. Wounds. Words. (a literary arts revolution that serves BIPOC storytellers), former editor-in-chief of Black Femme Collective, has guest edited for The Rumpus and has served on the editorial teams at Women’s Studies Quarterly of The Feminist Press, SLICE Magazine, and Raising Mothers: A Literary Magazine. Nicole curated Raising Mothers' limited Justice Involved Mothers column, which was penned by justice-impacted BIPOC women. Learn more about Nicole at NicoleShawanJunior.com.
Closed captioning is provided. Partial and full scholarships are available. Email scholarship inquiries to Info@RootsWoundsWords.org. Explicitly state the scholarship (partial or full) you’re interested in.
Like all RWW offerings, this space is for Black, Indigenous, Latinx/e, Asian, and other Storytellers of Color only. BIPOC Storytellers are centered here, exclusively.