No creative writing experience required! Join Community Building Art Works for our monthly community building creative writing workshop in partnership with Strathmore. May’s workshop will be led by Rosebud Ben-Oni. Tickets can be found here. Doors at 6:30, workshop begins promptly at 7 pm.
About the series: Led by accomplished authors, these generative workshops focus on the craft of writing as a tool for introspection, communication, and connection. Bring a pen, a notebook, and an open mind! Tickets are $25, and we appreciate any donation to support our programs. Your donation will fund similar workshops at military hospitals.
About the Workshop: How can you use the idea of Self-Portrait both creatively and critically as a means to explore their culture(s) and communities? How can the feeling of Belonging in a larger collective sense– those who make up the social fabric of your life– inform and evolve your poetry?
About the Facilitator: Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, forthcoming in 2021, and the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019). She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. Her poem “Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark” was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. She writes for The Kenyon Review blog. She recently edited a special chemistry poetry portfolio for Pleiades, and is finishing a series called The Atomic Sonnets, in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday. Find her at 7TrainLove.org

Seema Reza is a poet and essayist and the author of two books: A Constellation of Half-Lives and When the World Breaks Open. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Writing and Community Building from Goddard College. In 2010 Seema began working with service members, veterans, and their families at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and has since developed a unique multi-hospital arts program that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization. In 2015, the USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore awarded Seema the Col John Gioia Patriot Award for her work with service members in military hospitals. Seema is a 2019 George W. Bush Institute Stand-To Veteran Leadership Scholar.