Workshop: Reading in/for Difficult Times with Saretta Morgan
Workshop: Reading in/for Difficult Times with Saretta Morgan
3 Sessions: Mondays, July 28 - August 11
6:30-9:00pm ET
plus optional weekly office hours
Saretta Morgan
Saretta Morgan is the author of multiple chapbooks and the poetry collection, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), which received a Southwest Book Award, and was named a finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Working across disciplines, she produces texts and interactive text-based experiences that prompt explorations of physical and social connection, drawing attention to how languages emerge through the practice of everyday life. Her work has been supported by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Dia Beacon, Tucson MoCA, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Phoenix Art Museum, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Jerome Foundation, Black Mountain Institute, and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, among others. She currently lives in Atlanta, where she trains in Capoeira and wild bird rehabilitation.
These three weeks are an invitation to slow down and listen for the critical knowledge that arrives through your body, even when your capacity to remain present feels thoroughly diminished. Whether you’re looking for a structure to help you through your summer reading list, or support in preparing for the academic year ahead, this generative and reflection-based course offers an intimate and exploratory space to practice receiving and building language when the world around you is crowding in.
Taking inspiration from the (intentionally) somatic practices of multi-colonized and diasporic writers; from critical disability studies; and from the physical material that structures your lived experience, you’ll develop rigorous, individualized reading strategies that are grounded in playfulness and self-discovery.
Workshop Highlights:
Redefine what it means for you to “sustain attention” through creative annotation exercises, guided meditations/visualizations, and procedural prompts.
Reconnect to your creative power by identifying where (in your body, in time/space) reading happens for you, and what support you might offer yourself when language (your own and that of others) feels inaccessible.
Recharge through weekly drop-in office hours designed to help you work through creative issues.
This course has 3 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Sunday, July 20.
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.
