WRITING WORKSHOPS.

Our writing workshops 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 workshops bring educators together to write in sustained community; others explore poetry as a public practice through documentary and socially engaged writing.

Workshops also provide space to bring work already underway or to begin shaping new pieces within a sustained workshop setting for writing and thoughtful feedback.

Current Workshops

Educator Writing Groups

Some workshops bring educators working inside and outside of schools together to develop nonfiction, memoir, and reflective writing projects. These groups create sustained space for writing, feedback, and conversation among people engaged in teaching and cultural work.

Artist-Led Workshops

Pop-up workshops are led by poet Mark Nowak and other visiting writers and artists working in documentary poetics and socially engaged forms. These sessions explore methods for writing with interviews, archival materials, and public language.

REDACTION

4 April / 1-3 PM ET

A workshop focused on redaction writing practices that reveal the essences and contradictions in civic texts.

Special Guest: documentary poet Mark Nowak.

REGISTER

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • $80

  • Reduced-rate access is available when cost is a barrier. Please reach out through Connect if you would like to discuss options.

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.

REGISTER

  • 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.

    • 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

  • 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

  • Reduced-rate access is available when cost is a barrier. Please reach out through Connect if you would like to discuss options.