As part of the 2021 Kweli International Literary Festival, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers will be in conversation with Angela Jackson Brown discussing Jeffers' The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of five critically acclaimed books of poetry, most recently, The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan, 2020), which won the 2021 NAACP Image Award and was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry. Her first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, is forthcoming from Harper on July 27, 2021. Love Songs has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist, and BookPage has called her “a writer to watch.” Jeffers is Professor of English at University of Oklahoma, where she has taught since 2002.

Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright who teaches Creative Writing and English at Ball State University in Muncie, IN. She is a graduate of Troy University, Auburn University and the Spalding low-residency MFA program in Creative Writing. She has published her short fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and poetry in journals like The Louisville Journal and the Appalachian Review. She is author of Drinking From a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, and her latest novel, When Stars Rain Down. In April of 2021, the Alabama Library Association awarded her the Alabama Authors Award in poetry.

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Dantiel W. Montiz is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, the Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award by the Key West Literary Seminar, and a Tin House Scholarship. Her debut collection, Milk Blood Heat, is an Indie Next Pick and has been hailed as "must-read" by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzefeed, Elle, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, One Story, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. Moniz is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is a 2020 Lannan Fiction Fellow and the author of the novel House of Stone, winner of a 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction and listed for the 2019 Orwell Prize, the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize, the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize, and the 2020 Balcones Fiction Prize. She has been invited to give public lectures about House of Stone at the University of Oxford, the Nordic Africa Institute, and Vassar College. She has taught fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and serves as an assistant professor of fiction at Emerson College.

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Estella Gonzalez was born and raised in East Los Angeles which inspires her writing. Her work has appeared in Kweli Journal, The Acentos Review and Huizache. Her fiction and poetry have been anthologized in Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature by Bilingual Press and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse by Lost Horse Press. She received a Pushcart Prize “Special Mention” and was selected a “Reading Notable” for The Best American Non-Required Reading. Her debut short story collection, Chola Salvation, was published April 30, 2021 by Arte Público Press.

Ivelisse Rodriguez’s debut short story collection Love War Stories is a 2019 PEN/Faulkner finalist and a 2018 Foreword Reviews INDIES finalist. She has published fiction in the Boston Review, Obsidian, Kweli, the Bilingual Review, Aster(ix), and other publications. She is a contributing arts editor for the Boston Review, where she acquires fiction. She was a senior fiction editor at Kweli and is a Kimbilio fellow and a VONA/Voices alum. She earned an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in English-creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. To learn more about Ivelisse, visit: www.ivelisserodriguez.com.

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In this workshop, Yiyun will talk about how stories about human relations are made of patterns rather than events and discuss how to apply ‘geometry’ in both a temporal and spatial sense – concepts such as triangulation, mirroring, invisible lines, beautiful symmetry – to create stories that transgress the ordinary.

“Some people hold the view that a story in contrast to a novel is an étude. I resist that notion. A story can be as big, as epic, as symphonic as a novel. And a story is never just a slice, or a sliver of life, but as complex, murky and unresolved as life.

To read a great story is to be absorbed into an entire world that is made of many lives. But a story is limited in its space and its word count.

In my own reading and writing stories, I have come up with a shorthand to distinguish an okay story or good story from a great story.

In every great story, there are at least 3 stories. Sometimes three stories are not enough. Why don’t we say 5 stories? In fact, why don’t we shoot for 7.

It may sound fancy or crazy to work 5 or 7 stories into the space of a single story. But I not only think it is possible. But more importantly, it is necessary if one wants to write a great story.

There are many ways to make multiple stories into one story. I'm going to talk about one way which is to think about geometry in story.” - Yiyun LI

Cost: $100

This craft talk is exclusively for BIPOC writers.

Please click here first to complete a required form, then submit your payment near the bottom of the page found here.

Kaitlyn Greenidge's debut novel is We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), one of the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is currently Features Director at Harper’s Bazaar as well as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her second novel, Libertie, is published by Algonquin Books and out now.

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