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Poetry Workshop: I Am Here: Affirmation as a Form of Resistance with Gabriel Ramirez
Thursday, August 5, 2021 @ 7:00 pm
Thursdays, August 5 – 26 (4 weeks)
7:00 – 8:30 p.m. EST | Online | Register to receive link
Pay-What-You-Can Pricing: To ensure that these special workshops facilitated by our Emerging Writer Fellows are as accessible as possible to the widest audience possible, we’re putting it into your hands to pay what you can for this workshop. Choose a ticket price, ranging from $25 to $100, based upon what feels right to you.
“Not being who I am is unacceptable.” —Nikky Finney
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” —Audre Lorde
A catalyst to choosing oneself through difficult times and practicing the importance of our truth, “I Am Here: Affirmation as a Form of Resistance” is a workshop where participants can speak back to that which has made us feel small, invisible and impossible throughout our lives. This workshop encourages participants to reclaim their bodies and histories. Whether it is a bully from your childhood, someone who told you that you can’t, or a country with systems that have shown they don’t care whether you are alive or not, it’s time to become bigger. It’s time to denounce the false truths others have given us about who we are and our worth. No previous workshop experience required.
Gabriel Ramirez is a queer Afro-Latinx poet, activist, and teaching artist who has received fellowships from The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, The Watering Hole, and CantoMundo. He has performed on Broadway in New York at the New Amsterdam Theatre, United Nations, Lincoln Center, Apollo Theater, and other venues and universities around the nation. Ramirez’s work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Vibe magazine, and on Remezcla.com, as well as in Bettering American Poetry Anthology (Bettering Books, 2017), What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press, 2019), and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Press, 2020).
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 workshops. Applicants must be currently-enrolled, (full time or part time) degree-seeking Miami Dade College students with a demonstrated financial need.
To Apply for a Scholarship:
Please send an email to Marci Cancio-Bello, Miami Book Fair programs coordinator at mcanciob@mdc.edu by Friday, July 30 at 11:59 p.m. EST. The message must include your contact information, the title of the workshop you’d like to take, a short statement of financial need, your MDC class schedule, and a writing sample. First-time writers who lack a writing sample should submit a statement explaining their interest in the workshop.
