This workshop centers on exploring our love of a place and our imagining. In these pandemic times, we've been staying close to home and become more rooted in our local community for our joys and preservation.
Under the guidance of poet Shelley Wong, students will review selected poems by Aracelis Girmay, Sarah Gambito, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Jennifer Chang, and discuss techniques that lend themselves to a sense of place using various approaches. Students will then use the discussion to create work conjuring a place that is real or imagined, in our present, past, or future.
Writers of all levels and all genres are welcome to join!
About the instructor, Shelley Wong
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize, and the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions, 2017). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2021, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.
About AS SHE APPEARS
Shelley Wong’s debut, As She Appears, foregrounds queer women of color in their being and becoming. Following the end of a relationship that was marked by silence, a woman crosses over and embodies the expanse of desire and self-love. Other speakers transform the natural world and themselves, using art and beauty as a means of sanctuary and subversion. With both praise and precision, Wong considers how women inhabit and remake their environment. The ecstatic joys of Pride dances and late-night Chinatown meals, conversations with Frida Kahlo, trees that “burst into glamour,” and layers of memory permeate these poems as they travel through suburban California, perfumed fashion runways, to a Fire Island summer. Wong writes in the space where so many do not appear as an invitation for queer women of color to arrive in love, exactly as they are.
COVID Notes
All attendees must be fully vaccinated and show proof of vaccination at the event. Masks are also highly encouraged. The Ruby has KN95 masks available to all at the front desk.