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Writers Workshops

Inprint Writing Workshop Online: Race, Resistance, Resilience – 2021-101

Course #2021-101
Mondays Starting January 25 6:30 pm–8:00 pm running 8 weeks
Instructor: Niki Herd & Cait Weiss Orcutt
This workshop is full

This workshop is free for Harris Health employees, BCM, and UT medical staff, this workshop will take place via Zoom. Participants will be provided the login link. 

WAITING LIST: This workshop is full. If you would like to be on a waiting for future Inprint Writing Workshops at Harris Health email info@inprinthouston.org.

Inprint proudly offers online writing workshops this winder for Harris Health employees, BCM, and UT medical staff. These workshops, providing participants a safe space for reflective writing about the extraordinary times we are living in, will be team taught by Niki Herd and Cait Weiss Orcutt. Participants will be invited to share their work in a digital anthology and a reading at the end of the workshop. 

Sponsored by Inprint, these workshops are made possible by a generous grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.

Having a body is complicated. As health professionals, you know all too well that moving through the world in flesh and blood (and skin tone) can be a vulnerable, confusing, and overwhelming experience. Moving through the world in our own specific combination of color, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, we each play a role in complex and interlocking systems of power and oppression. In this creative writing workshop—open to all levels of writers and all identities of people—we will come together to read, write, and discuss work that engages with race, identity, racism, and intersectionality. This past summer, the killing of Houston native George Floyd sparked protests throughout the country. Now more than ever, we are in need of honest talks about race, values, and the experiences that shape our beliefs. Please join us in a space free from judgement as we explore how your experience in your body has shaped your life. We want to hear, nurture, and validate your story; we want to help you share your truth with the world. Organized specifically for Harris Health employees, and co-led by Niki Herd and Cait Weiss, this virtual generative 8-week writing workshop will use poetry, flash fiction, and micro memoir centered around issues of race and identity to encourage discovery and spark your own creative writing. Works by writers such as Patricia Smith, Carmen Maria Machado, Sonya Renee Taylor, Sandra Cisneros, Ross Gay, and Hieu Minh Nguyen will provide the basis for writing prompts and group discussions in a safe and informal environment. No writing training or prowess is required. (Even secret writers or people who haven’t written since grade school are welcome. If your heart tells you you’re creative in any way, you count!) At the end of the workshop, the hope is that each participant moves forward with a deeper sense of themselves and others to prove that understanding and connection is possible, even now, especially now, as we face the 21st century together.

About the instructors

NIKI HERD is the author of The Language of Shedding Skin and co-editor with Meg Day of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master, which features the poetry of and critical essays about disability activist Laura Hershey. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Herd’s poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets (Poem-a-Day), Lit HubThe Rumpus, and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic, among other journals and anthologies. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Newberry Library, and Cave Canem. She lives in Houston where she is an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow and a PhD candidate of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston.

CAIT WEISS ORCUTT’s essays and poems have appeared in Boston ReviewBust Magazine, Chautauqua, FIELDThe Pinch, The Academy of American Poets online, and more. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets and Best of the Net, and her manuscript VALLEYSPEAK (Zone 3, 2017) won Zone 3 Press’ First Book Award, judged by Douglas Kearney. Cait has an MFA from The Ohio State University and is currently a PhD candidate in Poetry at the UH Creative Writing Program, where she received an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor/MD Anderson Foundation Fellowship.