The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its Trans/Nonbinary Retreat, which runs from Friday, June 7th, 2024 through Saturday June 8th, 2024. This event will be entirely virtual held via Zoom. All SAFTA retreats focus on generative writing, and this year’s retreat will also include the following craft talk sessions: “Elegies for Past Selves” and “Writing Together: On the Poetics of Citation.”
The event will be open to trans and nonbinary writers of all backgrounds and experience levels and provide an opportunity to work with many talented authors and poets from around the country, including workshop leaders Evelyn Berry and Aerik Francis, and keynote speaker Ching-In Chen.
Evelyn Berry is a trans, Southern writer, editor, and educator. She’s the author of Grief Slut (Sundress Publications, 2023) and a recipient of a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.
Aerik Francis is a Queer Black & Latinx poet based in Denver, CO. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Miseducation (NDR 2023), named the winner of the 2022 New Delta Review Chapbook Prize, and poetry chapbook BodyElectronic (Trouble Department 2022). Check out their website phaentompoet.com for more fun poetry stuff & things.
Descended from ocean dwellers, Ching-In Chen is a genderqueer Chinese American writer, community organizer and teacher. They are author of The Heart’s Traffic: a novel in poems (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009) and recombinant (Kelsey Street Press, 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry) as well as chapbooks to make black paper sing (speCt! Books) and Kundiman for Kin :: Information Retrieval for Monsters (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, Leslie Scalapino Finalist). Chen is co-editor of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities (South End Press, 1st edition; AK Press, 2nd edition) and currently a core member of the Massage Parlor Outreach Project. They are also a Kelsey Street Press collective member and an Airlie Press editor. They have received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda, Watering Hole, Can Serrat, Imagining America, Jack Straw Cultural Center and the Intercultural Leadership Institute as well as the Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers. They are currently collaborating with Cassie Mira and others on Breathing in a Time of Disaster, a performance, installation and speculative writing project exploring breath through meditation, health and environmental justice. They teach in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences and the MFA program in Creative Writing and Poetics at University of Washington Bothell and serve as the Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond. www.chinginchen.com
The total cost of attendance is $75. To apply for a fellowship, please upload a packet of 5-12 pages of writing (poetry, fiction, or nonfiction) along with a brief statement here by later than March 30, 2024. Winners will be contacted mid-April.
Space at this workshop may be limited, so please reserve your place today here.
