We know that even when it is exhilarating getting feedback can put us in a vulnerable space. We have carefully developed a workshop strategy informed by Felicia Rose Chavez’ The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop.

We aim to create a deliberate, decolonized approach to critique with all benefits of a traditional poetry workshop without the trauma of competition, negativity, and financial debt.

Small groups

Small break-out groups meet every class. In groups of 3 or 4 participants will take turns giving and receiving feedback on one poem.

Large group

The whole group works together in a “traditional” workshop setting. Each class time, 2-3 people will have a chance to receive feedback on one poem from the entire group, including the workshop facilitator.

Once during the course, there is a:

1-on-1

Every participant will have the opportunity to schedule a 1:1 editorial session with the Feedback Circle facilitator, Danielle Mitchell. Danielle is an intersectional feminist writer and community organizer with 17 years of workshop experience.

Danielle Mitchell (she/her) is an intersectional feminist, poet, and teaching artist. She is the Founding Director of The Poetry Lab and author of Makes the Daughter-in-Law Cry, winner of the Clockwise Chapbook Prize (Tebot Bach, 2017). Danielle is a survivor of sexual assault, chronic illness, and generalized anxiety disorder. As such, both her writing and her work as a mentor are informed by empathy, equity, and radical self-compassion.

Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Vinyl, Four Way Review, Transom, New Orleans Review, Nailed Magazine, and many other journals and anthologies. She holds a dual B.A. in Women's and Gender Studies and Creative Writing from the University of Redlands and is an alumna of the Community of Writers. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems about misogyny and the Internet.

Learn more about her at imaginarydani.com.

Online via Zoom! This means you are welcome to come to class not only from anywhere in the world…but from anywhere in your world. Still at work? Chilling at home? On vacation? We love the ease and accessibility of Zooming into workshop sessions. We also use Google Classroom for the distribution and storage of class documents.

We cap this space at 16 participants. We do this so everyone in The Feedback Circle has the opportunity for quality workshop time and attention.

You can expect about 10 minutes of feedback in small groups every week and a 20-minute feedback session in the large group. In addition, everyone gets 30 minutes of 1-on-1 editorial time with the workshop facilitator. We also use Google Docs to store poem drafts and their comments so the feedback doesn’t have to stop when the Zoom ends!

These are some of our key takeaways from The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Writing Classroom (Haymarket, 2020). They help us create writer-moderated conversations about poems in the workshop. We humanize each other by setting boundaries and honoring the intentions of the poet under review in the workshop. We do not use vows of silence or other rules that create systems of authority and disenfranchise the writer of the poem.

“Workshop participants should contextualize their writing process and the writing of others by reading it with an awareness of the author’s body and lived experience.”

“Workshop participants should suppress their immediate judgment of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as irrelevant, and instead listen to the author’s insights about their artistic process and project goals.”

“Workshop participants should respond to the author’s questions about their work with specific, grounded, craft-based feedback.”

“There is no electing out. We address the author by name. We quote the author’s lines back to them. We ask for permission to express our opinions, and accept a response of “no” should the author want to move on. We do this so that our workshop participants decenter themselves as authorities on their peer’s art. This requires more intensive action from our white students. They are not the norm by which we judge competence, clarity, and quality. Instead, they are collaborators in community, helping a fellow author to fulfill their artistic vision, the product of which may or may not be intended for them.”

Please note that this workshop is not associated with Felicia Rose Chavez. We are working to utilize her tactics with our whole hearts, but do not mean to imply her endorsement by mentioning her name! Also, we do not believe attendance at this workshop replaces reading her book, and STRONGLY encourage you to purchase a copy or borrow one from your local library!