WRITING STUDIOS
Our studios are small, live, online spaces for collective writing and inquiry. We work with narrative practice, documentary materials, and shared prompts to examine experience, perception, and social conditions through language. Some studios bring educators together to write in sustained community; others explore poetry as a public practice through documentary and socially engaged writing. Studios also provide space to bring work already underway or to begin shaping new pieces within a sustained workshop setting for writing and feedback.
Write Teachers
Write Teachers studios are for educators working inside and outside of schools, and others who want to write, whether or not they identify as writers.
We write together, read aloud if we choose, and revise with respect. The work rests on the belief that teachers need protected time, shared presence, and permission to write without explanation or justification. Writing is held as a public, relational practice.
The studios prioritize sustained attention, shared listening, and writing to process thinking rather than to produce an outcome. What emerges here can be adapted for students across ages, but the focus remains on teachers writing for themselves.
UPCOMING
Write Teachers Studios
REDACTION
4 April / 1-3 PM ET
A studio focused on redaction writing practices that reveal the essences and contradictions in civic texts.
Special Guest: documentary poet Mark Nowak.
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Special Guest: Documentary poet Mark Nowak
A one-day studio for educators inside and outside of schools who want to work with school and civic documents—textbooks, district and national policies, immigration transcripts, and constitutional law.Redaction is commonly understood as the censoring or obscuring of text. In this studio, redaction operates differently. Drawing on the practice developed by visual artist Titus Kaphar and poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, redaction becomes a way of revealing rather than hiding—making visible the language through which values, assumptions, and power relations are maintained.
We will work with existing materials to read closely, cut, rearrange, and reposition language across different surfaces and formats, paying attention to what official texts say, what they avoid, and what tensions they carry. Through redaction, we will surface the cultural contradictions that shape schooling and public life.
Open to anyone who wants to explore this method and write, teachers will find that this studio offers concrete, adaptable practices for working with language and history—approaches that can be carried back into classrooms as ways to read critically, teach thoughtfully, and engage students with the documents that shape their lives.
Facilitator: Lisa Arrastia -
Saturday, 4 April, 2026
1:00 - 3:00 pm EDT (all times Eastern).
Live, online.
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Although not required, you are encouraged to bring digital copies or photos of school and civic texts—such as textbooks, policies, handbooks, or public law—that contain language with the potential to reveal how values, assumptions, and power relations are held in place.
Examples include licensure requirements, history textbooks, instructional materials, and scripted curricula, school and district rules, signage, employee handbooks, the Constitution, and recent federal executive orders. Identifying names (e.g., a school's name) may be removed.
Simple materials for working with text at home (paper, scissors, adhesive, and a phone camera) will be useful.
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This is a small-group, live online workshop held on Zoom. Participants are encouraged to join from a quiet, private space with a reliable internet connection, using a laptop or desktop computer.
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$80
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We’re always willing to make our writing studios affordable, so don’t hesitate to contact us and let us know what you need.
Social Poetics Writing Studios, hosted by The Ed Factory, are pop-up workshops guided by documentary poet Mark Nowak and special guest poets that foreground poetry as a form of cultural engagement with everyday life and collective struggle. Drawing on Nowak’s work with workers, unions, and community groups around the world, these studios treat writing as a tool for witnessing conditions of labor, shared experience, and the forces shaping our social worlds rather than as a means of personal expression alone.
Poetry as a public practice—writing to examine history, labor, and the conditions shaping everyday life.
Social Poetics
Low Coup: A Summer Haiku Studio
6 June / 1-3:30 PM ET
A writing studio treating the three-line poem as a tool for refusal, solidarity, and public speech.
UPCOMING
Social Poetics Studios
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We will explore the radical history of haiku, study multiple haiku forms (Afriku, hay(na)ku, low coup, tanka, haibun), and experiment with this short-form, image-driven, minimalist poetry.
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Saturday, 6 June 2026
1:00-3:30 pm ET / 12:00-2:30 pm CT / 10:00 am-12:30 pm PT
Live, online via Zoom
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This is a small-group, live, online writing workshop held on Zoom. Everyone is encouraged to join from a quiet, private space with a reliable internet connection, using a laptop or desktop computer.
It is helpful, but not required, to have an active Google Drive account to easily access some of our shared resources. To sign up for Google Drive, visit accounts.google.com. -
$75
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We are always willing to make our writing studios affordable, so don’t hesitate to contact us to ask for what you need.
PAST STUDIOS
Microstories
Taking inspiration from the writing of Eduardo Galeano, this writing studio focused on short, precise narrative forms drawn from lived experience and the current historical moment.
7 & 14 March
Anti-ICE Haiku Workshop #2
A collective writing studio treating the three-line poem as a tool for refusal, solidarity, and public speech. Special guests: Mark Nowak, Eileen Tabios, and Christine Lewis.
7 February
Anti-ICE Haiku Workshop #1
Led by documentary poet Mark Nowak, this writing studio treats the three-line poem as a tool for refusal, solidarity, and public speech. Special Guest: Faisal Mohyuddin, “Liberation Haiku” and Lorraine Garrett, Worker Writers School.
31 January