Creative Writing Workshop: Record Interventions: Exercises in Documentary Poetry with Simone Zapata
4 Wednesdays: July 9, 16, 23, 30, 2025
7:00 – 9:00 p.m. (2 hours) / In-Person, MDC Wolfson Campus
Pay-What-You-Can Pricing: To ensure that these special workshops facilitated by our Emerging Writer Fellows are as accessible as possible to the widest audience possible, we’re putting it into your hands to pay what you can for this workshop. Choose a ticket price, ranging from $25 to $75, based upon what feels right to you.
How can a poem bear witness? What stories emerge from redacted text, family photographs, medical records, government forms? Documentary poetry offers us tools to question, reframe, and intervene in the records that shape our lives. In this generative workshop, we’ll explore strategies for engaging archival, institutional, and personal material, drawing inspiration from the work of M. NourbeSe Philip, Robin Coste Lewis, and Dolores Dorantes. Together, we’ll consider the stakes of our interventions alongside themes of appropriation, erasure, and polyvocality.
Participants will practice activating documents of their choice and ask: What happens when the poet becomes an archivist—or an interrogator? Writers of all levels are welcome.
Scholarships Available for MDC Students
Miami Book Fair is offering two (2) full-tuition scholarships for MDC students interested in attending the above-listed creative writing workshop. Applicants must be currently-enrolled, (full time or part time) degree-seeking Miami Dade College students with a demonstrated financial need. Deadline to apply is two weeks before the first class.
Click here to apply: https://mdc.formstack.com/forms/mdc_student_scholarship_application
Simone Zapata, this year’s Poetry Fellow, is a writer, editor, and educator from San José, California. Her recent work appears in Dilettante Army, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Brink Literary Journal. She has received scholarships and fellowships from Community of Writers, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Banff Centre, and California Institute of the Arts, where she earned an MFA in creative writing.
