First Draft: A Literary Social with Tyriek White

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: Tyriek White
Theme: Living Archives

In developing We Are A Haunting, the process of writing involved searching my own family archive: obituaries, a documented family tree, photo albums, all to reflect the structure, idiosyncrasies of an actual family. Archival work can be an act of summoning, a means of access to generational and ancestral stories. In our writing, the artifact can be used as a way into a narrative, containing history and memory, lending to how we think about character or space. How can we use the object/artifact as a means of storytelling?

Tyriek Rashawn White is a writer, musician, and educator from Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of the novel, We Are a Haunting (Astra House, 2023) which won the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize. He was named a 2024 National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree and has received fellowships from Callaloo Writing Workshop, New York State Writer’s Institute, and Key West Literary Seminar, among other honors. He is currently the media director of Lampblack Literary Foundation, which seeks to provide mutual aid and various resources to Black writers across the diaspora. He holds a degree in Creative Writing & Africana Studies from Pitzer College and most recently earned an MFA from the University of Mississippi.

Author Socials: Facebook, Instagram, X and website.