Are you a Queer and BIPOC writer seeking the community of a writing group?

Are you a novice writer ready to take the next steps in developing your craft? 

Are you a seasoned writer who craves the regularity and accountability of a creative collective to maintain discipline? 

Are you working on poetry, memoir, fiction, or genre blurring experiments and want a space that honors your form?

Join Nyoka Pierce, a graduate student in the English Creative Writing program at Western Carolina University, for an online interest session on November 12th at 6:30pm. This gathering will explore the needs, desires, and possibilities for a writing group specifically designed for Queer BIPOC voices. 

Our intention is to create a safe container where the intersectionality of Queer and BIPOC voices can come together to hone our craft. If you're interested in co-creating a space where your lived experience is mirrored in the community, where politics are left at the door and the joy of writing is welcomed in, where linguistic diversity is celebrated, and the pressure to conform to dominant literary norms is released—then this session is for you.

Let's imagine together and see what we can create.  

Nyoka Pierce is a Jamaican-born writer, photographer and artist who has found her home in Western North Carolina. After earning her bachelor’s degree in English from Stony Brook University in New York, she traveled widely to experience life beyond the city. Her journeys, and her love for the intricacies of the mundane, have enriched her perspective, influenced her creative work and fueled her passion for storytelling.

Through her writing, Nyoka honors the textures of language, land, and lineage, blending Appalachian and Caribbean tradition to explore what it means to belong. She is currently in her final semester of Western Carolina University’s English Creative Writing graduate program, where she won first place in the Kathy Rentz Professional Writing and Rhetoric Competition, and second and third place in the 2025 Literary Festival graduate writing contest for non-fiction, and poetry. Her current work explores linguistic identity and ancestral memory through memoir and sociolinguistic research.