Workshop: Writing Immigrant Queerness

WORKSHOP
WRITING IMMIGRANT QUEERNESS
Saturday, April 19th  |  1:00pm – 4:00pm

$25 : Surel’s Place Sustaining Members
$35 : General Workshop Registration
Partial scholarships available on request to info@surelplace.org.

People of color encouraged to attend, but writers of all backgrounds and levels welcome.

Max participants: 20

Ages 15 & up

REGISTER HERE

DESCRIPTION 

How do you create a life you’ve never seen before, and how do you trust that it honors those before you? In this workshop, writer-in-residence Amanda Machado explores how queer writers and writers of color have used writing as a tool to define the future they desired but could not yet create. In particular, the class will focus on writing from queer people of color from immigrant families. Through the inspiration of work from Audre Lorde, Daisy Hernandez, Ocean Vuong and others, together we’ll write on prompts that help unearth stories about how queerness and the immigrant experience help us think differently about desire, respectability, “the American Dream,” and family legacy.

BIOGRAPHY

In nearly a decade of their work, Amanda Machado (CA) has focused on writing stories about travel, outdoor adventure, and sexuality that center the experiences of queer people and women of color. Recognizing the common erasure of those stories, she has aimed to use her work, as writer Matthew Salesses wrote, to “take responsibility for absence.”

As a queer daughter of immigrants from Mexico and Ecuador, Amanda has always felt split between many places. “I write stories that show how those of us — children of immigrants and displaced people, queers, gender-expansive folks — who grow up with our first experiences of home and desire and identity expanding past binaries, ultimately become the kind of people who want to take in the world intimately, who view travel as something we naturally must do.” 

In this next chapter of their work, she also wants to write more directly about the link between ancestry, colonization and travel, how women have used travel to gain agency over their own bodies, escape violence, create refuge for themselves, and redefine who they are. 

Amanda has a BA in English Literature/Nonfiction from Brown University. Their work has been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Washington Post, Adroit Journal, Slate, The Guardian, Sierra Magazine, among many others outlets.  In addition to their essay writing, Amanda also is a public speaker and workshop facilitator on issues of justice and anti-oppression for organizations around the world. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that centers the experiences of people of color in how we tell stories about the outdoors.

This programming is supported in part by Creative West and the National Endowment for the Arts.