Multicultural Approaches to Writing Prose with Vanessa Garcia

4 weeks: Tuesdays, February 21 – March 14 / 7 – 9 p.m.

How does our background affect the way we write? Not just the material we bring to writing, but how we put it together. How can we take the most of our hyphenated, multi-layered, densely layered pasts and turn those roots into fruitful creative endeavors that are often genre-bending, and sometimes revolutionary. This class will explore what it means to be multicultural and how to be truthful to that core, while making the most of it in our creative writing – both fiction and nonfiction.

Vanessa Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist working as a novelist, playwright, and journalist. Her debut novel, White Light, was published in 2015, to great critical acclaim. Named one of the Best Books of 2015 by NPR, Al Dia, Flavorwire, and numerous other publications and institutions, the novel catapulted Garcia into the “2016 Top 10 New Latino Writers to Watch (and Read).” Her essays, OpEds, and features have appeared in The LA Times; The Miami Herald; The Washington Post; The Southern Humanities Review; The Art Basel Magazine; The Rumpus, among numerous other publications. She’s also a Huffington Post blogger. She holds a PhD from the University of California Irvine in English (with a focus in Creative Nonfiction), an MFA from the University of Miami (in fiction), and a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University (English and Art History).