What can we learn from Beyonce, a mushroom, the human body, and an art exhibition?  How do we "read the world" and learn to write alongside it?  In this workshop, artists and writers are invited to radically imagine a new arts activism that draws on multiple ways of knowing, lineages, histories, and explorations interrelationship between the natural world and an artistic expression of balance and connection.  Together we will explore ekphrasis, writing in response to art, in relationship to works of art that help illuminate the relationship between environmental politics, anthropocentric thinking, and racialized experience. 

Saturday, December 7 and Sunday, December 8, 2024 // 4:00 - 7:00 p.m. ET

This workshop is held online via Zoom. It will be recorded and available to participants for up to a month after its conclusion. You are welcome to sign up even if you can’t attend live to receive the recording.

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She has received fellowships and residencies and attended retreats with The Watering Hole, the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She is a recipient of a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures Grant. She recently retired early as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there. She currently supports poets and writers at the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer.

Tuition for this offering is $110.00. There are one full and four partial ($55.00) scholarships available. Scholarships are held through a random lottery. Please email Info@RootsWoundsWords.org at least one week before the workshop's start to request a scholarship.