Craft Seminar: Revising With Others in Mind with Saretta Morgan
Craft Seminar: Revising With Others in Mind with Saretta Morgan
1 Session: Tuesday, January 27
6:00-8:30pm ET
Saretta Morgan
Saretta Morgan is an award-winning poet and the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024) which received a 2024 Southwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Her writing considers the environmental impacts of U.S. militarism and is informed by over a decade of organizing, direct action, and study at the intersections of grassroots humanitarian aid, veteran-led demilitarization movements, and grassroots conservation.
Every literary text represents the efforts of intergenerational and overlapping communities struggling with and against each other to reproduce bodies of language. Language is, in the words of novelist, poet, and scholar, Cristina Rivera Garza: a form of material labor undertaken by concrete bodies in contact. When we position ourselves as authors, appropriation is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it should be taken for granted.
In this seminar we’ll reflect on the individuals, communities, and ecologies who make our individual practices of writing possible, and consider playful, somatic, and ethically-grounded strategies of revision that hold us accountable to what we’ve received from others. This isn’t a matter of citation. It’s a practice of building worlds in which those to whom we are indebted can live as fully as possible.
Workshop Highlights:
Create a living map of your practice and its influences.
Orient yourself through who you choose to honor.
Generate new writing through self-disruptive revision strategies.
This course has 2 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Sunday, January 18.
Saretta Morgan is the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), which received a 2024 Southwest Book Award and was named a Ms. Magazine Best Poetry Book of the year, and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling, 2018), and room for a counter Interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). Her work engages the ecologies and forms of connectivity that manifest alongside processes of State militarization.
Working across disciplines, she has produced interactive multimedia experiences for public audiences across the U.S., using engagement with texts to catalyze explorations of physical space and social connection at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Dia Beacon, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, among others.
A 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists recipient, her work has also received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tucson MoCA, Tamaas Cross Cultural Organization, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and POWERHOUSE.
Pedagogically, she takes a values-centered approach to the process of creative writing, drawing attention to how languages emerge through the practice of living intentionally and in alignment with personal values and intuition. She brings curiosity to the ways imagination and personal landscapes (historic, ecological, geographic, social, emotional ...) intersect to form unique poetics in language and otherwise.
Over the past decade she has participated in veteran-led organizing with Veterans for Peace NYC and About Face: Veterans Against the War, as well as the humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths Phoenix, which provides direct support to address the death and suffering of migrants in the Sonoran Desert. Additionally, she has been fortunate to participate in, and learn from, Indigenous-led water protection and food sovereignty work, Black-led community healing initiatives, and trans-led support for detained migrants. She believes in a Free Palestine as part of the broader inevitability of LAND BACK for Indigenous peoples across the earth.
In an interview with TC Tolbert for the University of Arizona’s Poet’s Corner, Tolbert asked at what point in the writing process she considers the reader: “That’s a hard one for me to answer. I'm not sure when. Lately I think about the range of Black women who I love and imagine them all into one room. I ask myself what I have to do to bring everyone into the conversation. It's a kind of proxy to see how many corners of myself I'm speaking from.”
Born in Appalachia and raised on military installations, she currently lives on Mvskoke lands in Atlanta, GA, where she trains in Capoeira and wild bird rehabilitation.