First Draft: A Literary Social with Marwa Helal

Wednesday, March 11 @ 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. EST via Zoom

Miami Book Fair presents First Draft, a series of free and informal writing events where community, craft, and rapid-fire creativity meet for monthly themed virtual salons where writers get social, share their work, and leave with great stories.

Instructor: Marwa Helal
Theme: Invention as Intervention

Writers will explore how creating new forms or reimagining existing ones serves as intervention in both their creative practice and the world’s urgent problems. Through generative prompts, participants will discover how formal innovation drives creative and social change.

Marwa Helal is a poet and journalist. She is the author of Ante body (Nightboat Books, 2022), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Invasive species(Nightboat Books, 2019), the chapbook I AM MADE TO LEAVE I AM MADE TO RETURN (No Dear, 2017) and a Belladonna chaplet (2021). She has been awarded fellowships from the Kresge Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, Whiting Foundation, New York Foundation of the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Poets House, and Cave Canem, where she invented the poetic form known as the Arabic.