Interdisciplinary Writers Lab: 2020 Fellows Reading
Kearny Street Workshop in collaboration with Asian Art Museum, presented Interdisciplinary Writers Lab (IWL), a 3-month, multi-genre master class for local writers of color scheduled during summer 2020. IWL is a unique program that challenges emerging writers to thoroughly explore and develop their writing skills and styles across multiple genres.
The goals of the IWL program include: providing local emerging writers/artists with the opportunity to challenge, develop, and expand their practice by working with established writers in a variety of genres; to contribute to the development of new literary forms and language that incorporate multiple forms of creative expression; to provide emerging artists with the opportunity to build community and connect with writers in the literary world; and to publish in a print anthology that highlights work by exciting new writers committed to exploring new forms and voices.
IWL 2020 is a collaboration between Kearny Street Workshop and Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
Celebrate the Interdisciplinary Writers Lab (IWL) with a reading by participants and instructors at the conclusion of the three-month workshop that encourages the development of new literary forms and voices. Interdisciplinary Writers Lab (IWL) is a multigenre master class for emerging local writers of color presented by Kearny Street Workshop in collaboration with the Asian Art Museum.
September 12, 2020 • 1P-3P
IWL Instructors
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Ingrid was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was a silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor's choice. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Buzzfeed, Nylon, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.
Photo by Jeremiah Barber
Barbara Jane Reyes
Barbara is the author of Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishers, 2017). She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of four previous collections of poetry, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003), Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), which received the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry, and To Love as Aswang (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2015). She is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco’s Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program. Her sixth book, Letters to a Young Brown Girl, is forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd. in September 2020.
Photo by Peter Dressel
Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of the bestseller, A River of Stars, and Deceit and Other Possibilities. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing, among other honors. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other publications.The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she teaches at the Writers’ Grotto, Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and elsewhere.
Photo by Andria Lo
