Nonfiction Workshop: Family History with Imagination with Maud Newton

This class is sold out. If you would like to be added to the waitlist, please email Alannys Milano at amilano@mdc.edu.

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September 30, 2023, 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. EST (3 hours)
Virtual via Zoom (link provided after registering)
Registration $65

It’s entirely possible to write factually about complex family history and ancestral harms while making space for creativity. Come explore ways of integrating empiricism, feeling, and imagination. Bring a pen, notebook, and index cards. Also, facts, questions, feelings, intuitions, synchronicities, speculations, and a sense of play.

We’ll focus on cultivating imagination around tough family histories and how to draw on creativity transparently in nonfiction while also prioritizing fact and establishing how the two intersect. Fiction and poetry writers, and writers of uncertain genre projects, are also warmly welcome.

The class is intended to be generative and supportive, and will be held as a presentation with writing exercises, occasional periods of participation by chat, and an opportunity for questions toward the end.

Suggested reading and the Zoom link will be provided one week before the class start date. A recording will be available for one month after the class date.

A request to participate indicates your agreement to preserve confidentiality around disclosures by participants and that you are entering the class in open-hearted good faith.

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2 Types of 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 Monday, September 18 at 11:59 p.m. EST. Click here to apply: https://mdc.formstack.com/forms/mdc_student_scholarship_application

Maud Newton Scholarships
Thanks to the author’s generosity, Miami Book Fair is offering two (2) full-tuition scholarships for anyone who identifies as BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and/or with different abilities. These scholarships are offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Deadline to apply is Monday, September 18 at 11:59 p.m. EST. Click here to apply: https://mdc.formstack.com/forms/general_writing_scholarship_application

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Maud Newton’s first book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House 2022), was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, the Washington Post, Time, Esquire, Garden & Gun, and Entertainment Weekly, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and Roxane Gay Book Club selection. It was called “a literary feat” by the New York Times Book Review and a “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” by the Boston Globe, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for a first book in any genre. Newton also writes personal essays, fiction, and cultural criticism. Recent bylines include the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, Esquire, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper’s Bazaar. Her work has been widely anthologized, including in Best American Travel Writing and the New York Times bestseller, What My Mother Gave Me. Newton She teaches writing and the importance of individually acknowledging ancestors’ complicity in larger cultural harms, and has discussed ancestors with NPR’s All Things Considered, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, WNYC, and UC Davis Jewish Studies/Religious Studies. She received the Narrative Prize and City College’s Irwin and Alice Stark Short Fiction Prize, both for fiction, and has been a Yaddo resident.

https://maudnewton.com/
https://www.facebook.com/maudnewtonwriting
https://www.instagram.com/maudnewton/
https://twitter.com/maudnewton
https://shop.booksandbooks.com/book/9780812987492