"Back In the Day" with Raina León

If you were like me as a child, you thought that if the wind blew just hard enough and if you held your arms out strong at just the right angle, you would be able to fly.  You knew your body for the wonders and possibilities of it!  In this workshop, we imagine the moment of first identifying our belly buttons.  We reclaim what others may have teased - a curved back, a lisp, an differently shaped nail - as beautiful.  We are beautiful and worthy of delight. Our unique qualities are natural and in tune with the miraculous mundane of the natural world.  This is a cross-genre workshop in which we will use various experimental techniques to shake loose and play, drawing on readings from writers like Bettina Judd, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Laurie Ann Guerrero among others.  Movement based meditation, online magnet poetry, random word generators, collage techniques, and more will lead you into a new seeing and love of the self.

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DR. RAINA J. LEÓN is an Afro-Latina writer and author of Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self (Alley Cat Books, 2019) as well as four other poetry books. She is a full professor of English Education at Saint Mary’s College of California and founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online journal of Latinx arts. Her fourth book of poetry, black god mother this body, is forthcoming from Black Freighter Press in 2022. She is currently working on a hybrid manuscript that explores black feminism, mothering, and resistance in and to the academy.

Raina received her BA in Journalism from Pennsylvania State University (2003), MA in Teaching of English from Teachers College Columbia University (2004), MA in Educational Leadership from Framingham State University (2014) and PhD in Education under the Culture, Curriculum and Change strand at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (2010). She recently completed her MFA in Poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California (2016).

She has received fellowships and residencies with the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, and Macondo.

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After you register, you will receive an "admission ticket" with the zoom link information on it.

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$35 or FREE to Members

Annual Membership $35