A guided writing prompt with a twist.
Because writing is thirsty work.
Have a drink. Write a story. Have another drink. Write a better story.
Miami Book Fair presents First Draft, a series of informal writing events that turn happy hours into great stories.
You’re inspired. But you’re also thirsty. Bring your own drink and log in for a First Draft event and a guided writing prompt. Share your writing. You never know what you might knock out as you knock one back!
Instructor: Rajiv Mohabir
Theme: Profound Acts of Translation
Writing “your story” can be filled with all kinds of elation and terror where you have to make decisions on what to highlight and what to leave out. This is a profound act of translation. In this generative time we will be working through a series of prompts that seek to highlight some strategies that make this art move in new bodies–whether it be prose, poetry, or hybrid works. Prompts will include translations (you don’t need to know another language), response to images, and both small and large group sharing.
Rajiv Mohabir’s memoir ANTIMAN (Restless Books 2021) received the 2019 Restless Books’ New Immigrant Writing Prize. He is also the author of three books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021), The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press 2017, winner of the 2015 Kundiman Prize; Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention 2018) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books 2016, winner of the Four Way Books Intro to Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry in 2017), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College, translations editor at Waxwing Journal.
