Forms & Features with Nathan Xavier Osorio

All are welcome to a poetry discussion and creative writing workshop, “Voicing Heirlooms: Sensing Home with the Personal Archive,” created and led by Nathan Xavier Osorio.

In this session, we use ekphrasis—and go beyond it—to think of the lyric and the poetic form as creative interventions that can excavate and reimagine home and our relationships to it. Key to this workshop is the use of personal archival materials and/or found objects which are poetic forms in themselves: they tell stories, survive through time, and like our own bodies, are porous wells of memory. Alongside these objects and the writing of other poets, we will work together to draft a poem.

Nathan Xavier Osorio is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Chapbook Fellowship for his collection, The Last Town Before the Mojave. His poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in BOMB, The Offing, Boston Review, Public Books, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. He is currently a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative/Critical Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His dissertation braids his own family’s migration story with an analysis of Latinx artists who use multimodal decolonial poetics to unsettle western forms and illuminate the complexities of life within coloniality. Learn more at nathanxosorio.com

To allow for more poets to participate in workshops with Visiting Teaching Artists, participants will be registered for the July workshop with Wendy Chen or the August workshop with Nathan Xavier Osorio, but not both workshops. This program is for adult participants, aged 18 and older.

Closed captioning is available via Google Meet. We are happy to provide ASL interpretation. Please let us know at least one week in advance, if possible, if you would benefit from an ASL interpreter in attendance. If you would benefit from any other accessibility measures, please contact us by emailing [email protected]. Learn more about Google Meet’s built-in accessibility features here.