Join us for a 5-week virtual workshop, co-taught by Jennifer S. Cheng, author of MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS, and Mia Ayumi Malhotra, author of NOTES FROM THE BIRTH YEAR
[This is a Virtual Ruby event, a 5-week workshop that will take place on Wednesdays, April 6, April 13, April 20, April 27, and May 4, from 6 to 8 PDT. Attendance at each meeting is expected. Zoom info and more details to follow with registration. We have discounted scholarship rates of $75 available for a BIPOC/LGBTQ nonmembers unable to pay the full fee; please email staff@therubysf.com by March 30.]
We form constellations. Our bodies are never isolated, are always enmeshed in shifting patterns of relation. –Jackie Wang
In these ongoing times of grief and dissonance, how might poetry formulate an expanse that, in its porousness, becomes a meeting place where we can speak, listen, and gather with one another? Can shared “practices of care and making,” as Wang puts it, draw us into greater joy and integration? This five-week class is an experiment in various poetic modalities of connection, such as letter writing, daily observation, hand-sewing, and recursive mark-making. As we examine works by poets and artists, we will ask ourselves how poetry can act as a medium for intimacy and discovery. Through writing rituals and thoughtful exploration of textual artifacts and other curiosities, we will consider what it means to articulate the self within hearing distance of one another. For what if by speaking nearby, we create the field that lives between us? No prior experience reading or writing poetry needed, just a desire to experiment and willingness to connect with others.
About Jennifer S. Cheng
Jennifer S. Cheng’s work includes poetry, lyric essay, and image-text forms exploring immigrant home-building, shadow poetics, and the feminine monstrous. She is the author of MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (Tarpaulin Sky), named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018,” and House A (Omnidawn), selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize. She has received awards and fellowships from Brown University, the University of Iowa, San Francisco State University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, MacDowell, and the Academy of American Poets. Occasionally, she teaches creative writing, most recently at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, and The Ruby. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco. www.jenniferscheng.com
About Mia Ayumi Malhotra
Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Notes from the Birth Year (Bateau Press, 2022), winner of the BOOM Chapbook Contest, and Isako Isako (Alice James Books, 2018), California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, the Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Yale Review, CALYX, Indiana Review, and The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit, and she lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.