Upcoming Kundiman Events:

“It’s My Party & I’ll ___ If I want to:
on memory & Mess”
Poetry with George Abraham

July 16th to August 20th
Thursdays, 6:00–8:30PM ET

"‘I admit, there is a self, who is not my current self, who could have never imagined any of this: writing among a community that Sees and uplifts the whole of me, the whole of us; writing among a literary and socio-political imagination that could radically reclaim Palestinian representations through the aforementioned works, as well as groundbreaking prose such as Randa Jararr’s ‘Him, Me, Muhammad Ali’ and Sa’ed Atshan’s ‘Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique.’ What queerer notion of country is there than this, than us?”
–– George Abraham, Lit Hub: “Against Consumption: Palestine in the American Imagination” 

Modern psychology and neuroscience have given us direct scientific insight onto the nonlinearities of human memory – from perception, to cognition, to the formation and consolidation (or lack thereof) of memory, it is apparent that both embodied and epigenetic traumas act on every stage of a memory’s life cycle. As marginalized writers, the (dis)embodiment of memory often plays a central role in our work, especially when one considers notions of inherited or ancestral memory. This workshop will challenge participants to lean into constructs of memory – in all their mess, complication, and contradiction – in their writing. How does memory Write, and otherwise act on, our poetry via form, landscape, image, and literary lineage? How can the access (and lack thereof) of memory push our writing to challenge not just the realities around us, but the implicit assumptions underlying our perceptions of those realities?

This class will include assigned readings by contemporary BIPOC & LGBTQ writers working through these complications of living, ancestral, and historical memory, including the poetry & hybrid-genre work of Hala Alyan, Suji Kwock Kim, Marwa Helal, Ocean Vuong, Layli Long Soldier, Adeeba Shahid Talukder, Omar Sakr, John Murillo, and more.

The first few classes will comprise of literary discussion and generative exercises, and then we will transition over to workshopping each other’s work (everyone will be workshopped once) and discussing revision exercises. There will be 1 poetry book required for purchase in this class, but all other readings will be distributed via online links and PDFs. While poetry will be the main focus of this course, participants will be reading works in all genres, and will be encouraged to turn in poetry that experiments with genre and form!

This workshop is open to all writers who are BIPOC. All students must be able to attend all six sessions of the workshop. The non-refundable tuition fee is $350. This workshop will be limited to 12 participants and will be held over Zoom. There is one scholarship spot available. If interested in a scholarship, please apply by July 1st.

Please note you will be asked to submit 3-5 pages of poetry before class begins as a way of introducing your work to the instructor and your classmates!

This class is now full!

To be added to the waitlist, please email info@kundiman.org with the subject line ‘Online Poetry Waitlist.’

Scholarship Applications are now closed