Writing in All Your Tongues: A Bilingual Workshop-Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés

Writing in All Your Tongues: A Bilingual Workshop with Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés

This workshop is for youth in the 6th-12th grade age range.

The US has no official language, though almost every facet of the American Educational system neglects the languages of many students. Students that were bilingual or monolingual in one language before entering school, sometimes lose or fail to develop their home language. This workshop will provide prompts and exercises to encourage students to use their home/heritage languages in their creative writing whether it is in their stories, poems, or personal essays.

Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés’ work has appeared in South Writ Large, Acentos Review, LitWrit Bangladesh, Azahares, The Antonym, Guernica, Kweli Journal, Literary Mama, and The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. Her short story collections, Oye What I’m Gonna Tell You from Ig Publishers which released Marielitos, Balseros, and Other Exiles in 2009, were #4 and #5 on the Guardian’s list of 10 of the best books to help understand Cuba. Everyday Chica, winner of the 2010 Longleaf Press Poetry Prize, was followed by Everyday Chica, Music and More, a poetry CD set to Caribbean folk music and released in 2011. She is Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches Latinx literature, the work of Women Writers of Color, and creative writing.

Shannon C. Ward

Raised in a renovated slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Wilmington, Ohio, Shannon Ward is author of the poetry collection Blood Creek (Longleaf Press, 2013). She received an MFA in Poetry from North Carolina State University in 2009, and she is the recipient of the 2016 Foley Poetry Prize, the 2016 White Oak Kitchen Prize in Southern Poetry, and a 2013 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize. Her work has received generous support from Yaddo, Willapa Bay AIR, the Eastern Frontier Educational Foundation, the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Hypatia in the Woods, and Vermont Studio Center, and her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Great River Review, Tar River Poetry, and others.

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