No creative writing experience required! Join Community Building Art Works for our monthly community building creative writing workshop in partnership with the Torpedo Factory Art Center. February’s workshop, “Scene-Building: Making Your World Real” will be led by author Leslie Pietrzyk. Doors at 6:30, workshop begins promptly at 7 pm. EVENTBRITE REGISTRATION REQUIRED
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 free, but we appreciate a donation of $10-$30 to support our programs. Your donation will fund similar workshops at military hospitals.
About the facilitator: Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of Silver Girl, released in February 2018 by Unnamed Press, and called “profound, mesmerizing, and disturbing” in a Publishers Weekly starred review. Her collection of unconventionally linked short stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her previous novels are Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day. Short fiction and essays have appeared/are forthcoming in Washington Post Magazine, Salon, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, The Sun, Shenandoah, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Iowa Review, Washingtonian, The Collagist, and Cincinnati Review. Pietrzyk is a member of the core fiction faculty at the Converse low-residency MFA program and teaches often in the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing program. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia. For more information: www.lesliepietrzyk.com
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.
