First Draft: A Creative Writing Social with Simone Zapata
June 10, 2025 / 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM / 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.
Theme: Textual Performativity
We’re all familiar with the performance of poetry such as live readings and spoken word, but what does it take for a text to perform itself? How do form, page layout, and rhetorical strategies impact the intention of the poem’s language? This First Draft session will center play and experimentation as we generate our own performative poetry alongside work by Douglas Kearney, Airea D. Matthews, and Layli Long Soldier.
Simone Zapata, our Poetry Fellow for the Emerging Writer Fellowships, 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.
