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The Alchemy of Storytelling: Learning to Manipulate Personal Narrative and Personal Mythology in Memoir and Poetic Forms
w/Natalie Diaz & Melissa Febos

Thursday, June 19, 2014
6-8 p.m.
Cost: $40
To register please email casakeepers@casalibre.org

In this generative workshop we will take the raw material of our lives, and see how the tools of image, structure, and voice create and shape narratives in poetry and memoir respectively, and where these forms overlap. Open to writers interested in narrative, memoir, poetry, lyric essay, and even fiction.

Teacher Bios:

Photo by: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Natalie Diaz grew up in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Community. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia for several years, she completed her MFA in poetry and fiction at Old Dominion University. She was awarded the Bread Loaf 2012 Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry, the 2012 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Literature Fellowship, as well as being awarded a 2012 Lannan Literary Fellowship. She won a Pushcart Prize in 2013. She teaches in the IAIA low rez MFA program. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published in June 2012, by Copper Canyon Press. She currently lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, and directs a language revitalization program at Fort Mojave, her home reservation. There she works and teaches with the last Elder speakers of the Mojave language.

Melissa Febos is author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press, 2010). Her work has been widely anthologized and appears in publications including Glamour, Salon, Dissent, New York Times, Kenyon Review, Post Road, Bitch Magazine, The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, The Portland Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Chronicle of Higher Education Review, and she has been featured, among other places, by NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN, The Atlantic, and Anderson Cooper Live. Selected by Lia Purpura as the winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Contest, she is the recipient of a 2013 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Artist Grant, a 2012 Bread Loaf Nonfiction Fellowship, and MacDowell Colony fellowships in 2010 and 2011. Currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Monmouth University and MFA faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), she has also taught at Sarah Lawrence, The New School, NYU, and Purchase College. The daughter of a sea captain and a psychotherapist, she was raised on Cape Cod, and lives in Brooklyn. 

Natalie Diaz & Melissa Febos will be reading their work for the Edge Reading Series at Casa Libre on June 18
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