PSNY BIPOC Free Verse Workshop: The Personal Archive

A free generative virtual workshop for BIPOC Creatives with poet Saba Keramati!

An archive is both the place in which historical materials are presevered, as well as the material itself. In this way, we are living archives, and our poetry is too. How do we ensure that our personal archives survive colonialism, erasure, or destruction? In this generative writing workshop, we will excavate memory -- individual and ancestral. We will explore poetic forms that allow for memory to thrive (the documentary poem, the narrative poem, the epistorlary, for example) and we will write to uncover what already lives within our bodies.

About the instructor: Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. She is the author of Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press, 2024), selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series. The poetry editor for Sundog Lit, Saba's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lit Hub, Kenyon Review, The Margins, and other publications.

PSNY's Free Verse Workshops are identity-centered, free virtual spaces designed to uplift marginalized creatives. To create a system of equity within our community, participants of all Free Verse Workshops receive a 50% discount code, redeemable on any of our Weekly Virtual Workshops, each Thursday from 7:00 PM - 8:15 PM EST. For more on the program, feel free to visit https://poetrysocietyny.org/free-verse.

If you do not identify as BIPOC, we warmly invite you to explore other PSNY events.