Crafting Identity: How to Write Like Your Authentic Self with Keisha-Gaye Anderson

Who are we? Who are we told we are? Who do we know ourselves to be?

This workshop will explore how identity—imagined, imposed, and re-imagined—is utilized in poetics to communicate and construct objective and subjective reality. Through close examination of language, structure, form and other devices used within selected poems, workshop participants will become familiar with approaches to this craft that focus on powerfully probing and defining identity, in ways that empower them and accurately reflect the themes or experiences they are exploring in their writing.

To that end, a series of writing prompts will be used so that participants may generate poems from different perspectives in order to move closer to the expression of their essential/hidden selves in their writing.

We will also tackle basic elements of poetry and discuss workshop poems using select poetic forms.

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KEISHA-GAYE ANDERSON is a Jamaican-born poet, writer, and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her poetry books include: Gathering the Waters (Jamii Publishing 2014) Everything Is Necessary (Willow Books 2019) and A Spell for Living (Agape 2020), which received the Editors’ Choice recognition for the Numinous Orisons, Luminous Origin Literary Award.

Her poetry, fiction, and essays have been widely published in Kweli Literary Journal, Small Axe Salon, Interviewing the Caribbean, Renaissance Noire, The Caribbean Writer, The Killens Review of Arts and Letters, Mosaic Literary Magazine, African Voices Magazine, The Langston Hughes Review, Streetnotes: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Caribbean in Transit Arts Journal, The Mom Egg Review, and others.

She is a graduate of the Syracuse University Newhouse School and College of Arts and Sciences and hold an M.F.A. in creative writing from The City College, CUNY.

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After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.

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$35 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $35