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How does your ordinary life reflect a larger human narrative? In this 2-session course we will consider how our own experiences have been shaped by social, cultural, and political dynamics, and the ways our writing can affirm or disrupt well-established accounts. To guide our discussions and writing, we will read short essays by innovative authors such as Patricia Smith, Bernard Cooper, Kiese Laymon, and Peggy Shumaker. We will catalog approaches these writers use to transform broad events into compelling and intimate narratives. As we turn to our own work, we will consider how to handle memory, archival documents, diaries, letters, photographs, and oral history (you will be asked to bring in specific material). Through the use of writing prompts, I will invite you to transform traditional and unconventional research into vibrant prose and offer both introspection and an outward gaze in your work. This will be a hands-on workshop where you will generate new writing, share your work, and respond to the writing of others.

CATINA BACOTE is a nonfiction writer and educator. She is a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, and her essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, December Magazine, Gulf Coast, The Common, Southern California Review, Prairie Schooner, Kweli Journal, The Offing, Black Warrior Review, Fourth Genre, and the anthologies This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home, and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. Her writing has been supported by the Ann Cox Chambers Long-form Journalism Fellowship from MacDowell, the Alice Judson Hayes Social Justice Fellowship from Ragdale, and the American Association of University Women Fellowship. She holds an MA from Teachers College, Columbia University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she subsequently served as the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. She has taught creative writing at Warren Wilson College, St. John’s University and currently teaches at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.