Nonfiction Workshop: Writing About Race - Remote!

Class Description

Facts don’t change our minds. Stories do. There’s a craft to story, and there’s a particular craft to writing about issues like race, immigration, and white supremacy. This nonfiction workshop is about writing the hard, emotional truths. In this class, we begin with the very gritty, undeniable facts of our individual experiences, and we render them in such a way that any reader can imagine themselves in our shoes. This is the work of storytelling, and this is the work of this class.

How do we keep people turning the page - or scrolling the cursor - even when they may or may not agree with our perspective? How can we make assertions about everyday realities like racism or oppression that are novel and surprising, both true to our own stories and applicable to those of others? In this class, we will learn how to ground big questions within the form of personal essays. We will return to the nuts and bolts of craft to explore how we might locate phenomena such as microaggressions and historical violence within the acute site of our own bodies.

Each of us will submit work for peer workshop; and from our pieces, we will learn and refine universal elements of craft as they pertain to writing about our race, our personhood, and our identities in America. You will be in the company of other serious writers and an experienced instructor dedicated to giving careful and insightful feedback. We will draw from contemporary American writers such as Brit Bennett, Jenny Zhang, Ross Gay, and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.

This class will be hosted using live Zoom meetings! You will be able to participate in class via Zoom videoconference from wherever you’re most comfortable. All you’ll need is a laptop or a phone! About 15 minutes before your class is scheduled to begin, you'll receive an email from your instructor with a link to join the class meeting via Zoom–no need to download anything or sign up for Zoom in advance! If you have questions about remote learning, please feel free to reach out to [email protected] for more information.

For a glimpse at how remote learning works, look no further than the deep Zoom discussion of writing and literature below:

To apply, please click the red "SEE DIRECTIONS TO APPLY" button in the top right corner of this page. This application will ask you to detail your workshop experience. It will also ask you to upload a 5-10 page writing sample. Please make sure this writing sample is in Microsoft Word, double-spaced, and in 12-point font. For tracking purposes, your name should appear in the file name (e.g. Smith.Memoir Title.Submission). Decisions will be emailed to applicants approx. 1 week after the deadline. You can also track the status of your application in your Grubstreet profile. Please make sure your application is complete before you finally click "APPLY." If you have any technical difficulties filling out this application, please email [email protected]. You will receive a confirmation email once our system has received your submission.

Scholarship Information

Thanks to the excellent literary citizenship of our donors, scholarships are available for all GrubStreet classes. To apply, click the gray "APPLY FOR SCHOLARSHIP" button. In order to be considered for a scholarship, you must complete your application at least one week before the start date of a class. Please await our scholarship committee's decision before registering for the class. We cannot hold spots in classes, so the sooner you apply, the better. Scholarships cannot be applied retroactively.

For more more detailed information about GrubStreet scholarships, including how to contribute to scholarship funds for other students, click here.