Poetry Is Not a Luxury: Reclamation, Resistance, Self-Healing & Survival with Bushra Rehman

Six Tuesdays, October 9–November 13

“[P]oetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” -Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde’s words ring truer than ever in our day and age. In this workshop, we will read and write poetry of reclamation, resistance, self-healing and survival. Together, we will gain inspiration from reading the work of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Mohja Kahf and Kamilah Aisha Moon among others radical writers of color. We will  use techniques of emotional excavation to generate new material and experiment with free form poetry as well as the traditional  forms of the cento and pantoum. Through facilitated discussion, we will provide feedback on each other’s work, from line breaks to break throughs. This class is for those who are ready, or looking for tools, to write “toward survival and change.”

Class Dates:
Tuesday, October 9, 6–8:30 PM
Tuesday, October 16, 6–8:30 PM
Tuesday, October 23, 6–8:30 PM
Tuesday, October 30, 6–8:30 PM
Tuesday, November 6, 6–8:30 PM
Tuesday, November 13, 6–8:30 PM

Bushra Rehman is a poet, novelist and teaching artist. Her novel Corona, a dark comedy about being South Asian American, was noted by Poets & Writers among the year’s Best Debut Fiction. Her poetry collection Marianna’s Beauty Salon was released in 2018 to great acclaim. Her first YA novel Corona: Stories of a Queens Girlhood will be published by Tor/Macmillan in 2020. Rehman is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism and creator of the community-based writing workshop Two Truths and a Lie: Writing Memoir and Autobiographical Fiction.