KWELI INTERNATIONAL LITERARY FESTIVAL
MASTER CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS
PROGRAM SCHEDULE
Click any image to learn more about the master classes and workshops.
The master classes and workshops are exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Manuscript critiques are available for an additional fee.
Before and After
Led by Danielle Evans
Saturday, July 25, 2020; 2:00pm - 5:00pm
$100
This lecture and workshop will focus on the capacity of fiction to occupy the past, present, and future at once, and ask writers to think about how being conscious of the moments in prose when time compresses call attention to moments of transformation or trauma.
This workshop is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
Evasive Protagonist Syndrome: A Craft Class in Revising Fiction
Led by Kirstin Valdez Quade
Saturday, August 1, 2020, 2:00-5:00pm
$100
One of the most common problems of early drafts is that of the evasive protagonist. Our characters can be sullen and reticent, unwilling to plumb their own depths, unwilling to address what is most painful and uncomfortable. They have a million and one reasons for not wanting to reveal themselves to the reader—or to themselves—yet a successful story depends on complicated, layered, and, above all, present characters. In this class we will discuss the diagnosis and treatment of EPS.
This master class is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
Reinvented Lineages & Matriarchal Storytelling - AT CAPACITY
Led by K-Ming Chang
Saturday, August 1, 2020, 11:00-12:30pm
Saturday, August 8, 2020, 11:00-12:30pm
$100
This two-day workshop will focus on matriarchal writing and the process of reinventing lineages through storytelling. The workshop will explore matriarchal and intergenerational storytelling as subversion and resistance to a patriarchal world, as well as a way to reclaim agency and explore love, violence, and tenderness. We will read fiction and non-fiction that centers grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and queer women in storytelling. This will be a generative workshop with in-class prompts and exercises that excavate buried histories, reclaim communal and personal mythology, and examine intergenerational relationships as the backbone of storytelling.
This workshop is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
Growing and Shaping the Essay
Led by Mikael Awake
August 2, 2020, 11:00-12:30pm
August 9, 2020, 11:00-12:30pm
$100
The essay is a space to honor contradiction, like the contradiction of a language used to spread racial capitalism singing towards Black liberation. It’s important to understand the roads that essay paves—to memory, research, imagination—as well as the roadblocks. In this two-day workshop, we will discuss growing and shaping the essay, drawing not only from poets and fiction writers, but music and arts. We will explore what structure can mean, how care can manifest, and how we might enact, as Saidiya Hartman writes, “the ceaseless practice of black radicalism and refusal, acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure”?
This workshop is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
At the Mercy of Genius: On Form and Intention
Led by Vincent Toro, 2:00 - 5:00pm
Saturday, August 15, 2020
$100
Oscar Wilde once wrote, “were it not for… the set forms of verse, we should all be at the mercy of genius.” This workshop will question our understanding of poetic form, why poets adopt a particular form for their work, and how form can be used as a political act. Together, the group will learn about poetic forms beyond the traditional ones taught in most schools and MFA programs and consider how structures and rules can strengthen their own writing. The facilitator will lead the group through a series of discussions, poetic games, and experiments. In this workshop participants will both generate new work and revise old work. For this workshop you will need the following three texts: one of your own original poems that you feel is unfinished or “missing something,” one poem from another poet whose language appeals to you, and one piece of writing from a non-literary source (a newspaper article, an instructions manual, a comic strip, etc.).
This workshop is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
Humor as Bait, Balm & Machete
Led by Jakob Guanzon
Sunday, August 16, 2020, 2:00 - 5:00pm
$100
Behind every text that has ever made you snicker, chuckle, or literally lol, there was a writer agonizing over how to coax that very reaction. In fiction, humor has oodles of functional ends: to entice or provoke the reader; to humanize or debase a character; to challenge the powers that be or satirize society at large; to upend expectations or subvert clichés; even to console. All are worthy aims, ones which demand both artistry and cunning to achieve on the page. The mark of a master, however, is the ability to transcend the plains of humor and plunge the reader into pathos. Often, these blows of emotionality land all the harder because they are unexpected. In this class, we'll unpack scenes and short pieces in order to pinpoint (and later steal) the myriad comedic techniques writers deploy to bait readers, easing them tender-belly-up for a final gut-punch of pathos.
This master class is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
The Art of Consciousness
Led by Nadia Owusu
August 22, 2020, 2:00 - 5:00pm
$100
Some of the best contemporary works of fiction and narrative nonfiction mix ample amounts of reflection into their storytelling, incorporating philosophy, theology and politics. What are some strategies for making this work? We’ll consider examples from Sarah Broom, Weike Wang, Terese Marie Mailhot, and James Baldwin whose intertwining of thought and narrative have earned wide acclaim. And, we'll discuss and practice relevant techniques.
This master class is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
From Memory to Story: A Generative Memoir Workshop - AT CAPACITY
Led by Nicole Chung
August 15, 2020, 11am - 12:30pm
August 22, 2020, 11am - 12:30pm
$150
How do writers illuminate universal questions and truths within a personal narrative? In this generative workshop, students will consider how to draft and revise narratives built on a foundation of memory and personal experience. Prior to the start of the workshop, participants are invited to submit 2-3 pages of work, ask specific craft questions, and share any particular challenges they are facing in their own writing. Our class discussion will then cover as many of these issues as possible in mini craft talks, with the goal of helping students identify needed revisions and strengthen their individual memoir/essay projects. In addition to discussing narrative structure, pacing, characterization, voice, the balance between scene and exposition, and the ethics of personal writing, we will set aside time for brainstorming and generative writing, learn from the work of other writers, and participate in frank conversations about editing, pitching, publishing, and literary community-building.
This workshop is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
Plot and Narrative Structure: Strategies and Alternatives
Led by David Heska Wanbli Weiden
Sunday, August 30, 2020, 2:00 - 5:00pm
$100
In this fiction seminar, we’ll examine in detail the standard three-act plot design, as well as techniques and strategies to improve the arc of your work. Specifically, we’ll analyze some of the strategies used by screenwriters to generate tension and suspense on the page. We’ll also examine alternatives to the standard model and contemplate the possibility of decolonized narrative structures. We’ll consider examples from Walter Mosley, Sandra Cisneros, and Tommy Orange, and conclude with a writing exercise, followed by a dialogue and discussion.
This master class is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
Memoir Master Class: Expanding the Personal Narrative
Led by Jaquira Díaz
Saturday, September 12, 2020, 2:00-5:00pm
$100
We will examine how personal narrative can speak to something larger, more expansive; how personal stories are connected to the larger world; how personal narratives can engage with music and history and place and culture; how a news story, or music, can become a vehicle for a personal story. We’ll read and examine excerpts of memoirs and essays and poems that incorporate music, history, pop culture, and family lore, with a particular focus on expanding personal stories to connect them to the larger world, and we’ll discuss how you can model this in your own work.
This master class is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
On Revision
Led by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Sunday, September 13, 2020, 11am - 2pm
$100
For this masterclass, students will focus on tactics for revising fiction, from short form to long form. The act of revision can take a good story and make it great. But how do you know where to start? From point-of-view to structure to that ever elusive concept of plot, this masterclass will help students identify their own revision needs and assist students in addressing narrative challenges.
This master class is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
Perishable Kingdom: Environmental Writing at the End of the World
Led by Joshua Bennett
Sunday, September 13, 2020, 2:00-5:00pm
$100
The persistence of black life, and blackness as a way of thinking about the organization of both human and nonhuman forms of life, has been absolutely central to the making of the modern world. This workshop provides an interdisciplinary exploration of the writing of thinkers from across the African diaspora, with special emphasis on poetry and criticism centrally concerned with the intersections of black literary studies and black environmental thought. Following Ed Roberson’s contention that “the world does not run the earth, but the earth does run the world” we will linger with the writings of those who have been forced to theorize from the underside of modernity, those who view black literary studies and the practice of black poetics, in the first instance, not only as inter-institutional enterprises, but indeed as planetary thinking.
In that vein, for the purposes of this workshop we will read and listen to the works of Stevie Wonder, Aracelis Girmay, Sylvia Wynter, Ross Gay and others towards the aim of elaborating in ensemble a working theory of black environmental writing, black gathering, black study as a commitment to care for the earth.
This master class is exclusively for BIPOC writers.
Before making your payment, please click here to complete a required form.
This course will take place online via Zoom. Participants will receive instructions for access prior to the start of class.
