Creative writing is a tool for knowing yourself, understanding the world, and connecting with other people. Led by author Seema Reza and accomplished guest writers—including poets, memoirists, novelists, and storytellers—these community workshops follow the model developed by Mission Belonging over the course of a decade of bringing people together in military and hospital settings. Each workshop is designed to help participants put their personal stories on paper in a supportive environment.
Whether you’re just starting out or have been writing for years, you are welcome; no experience is required. Bring a pen, a notebook, and an open mind!
Registration closes at 4pm Eastern Time before each session so we can prepare. Please make sure you're subscribed to Strathmore emails to receive the Zoom info.
Thu, August 21 | 7pm Eastern Time
Breaking the Little Song: Subverting the Sonnet Form with Diannely Antigua
Breaking the Little Song: Subverting the Sonnet Form explores how contemporary poets are reshaping a form that originated in 13th-century Italy as a vessel for love poems. Once rigid in rhyme and structure, the sonnet now offers fertile ground for innovation and resistance—what Terrance Hayes calls "part music box, part meat grinder." In this workshop, participants will study examples of subverted sonnets and experiment with transforming the form to suit their own voices and urgencies. Through guided writing exercises and discussion, we’ll break open the “little song” and reimagine what a sonnet can be.
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. From 2022-2024, she was the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project, and in 2024, she was awarded an Excellence in Artistry Award from Black Lives Matter New Hampshire. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry which seeks to make poetry accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul.
Instagram: @nellfell13
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Thu, September 18 | 7pm Eastern Time
Remix Poetry: A Path of Discovery with Darnell Arnoult
In this playful and generative workshop we’ll discover the art of remix poetry. We’ll break apart existing texts and reconfigure words into new phrases, lines, and stanzas thereby building new wholly original poems. For beginning or experienced poets. Be ready to embrace the unexpected.
Darnell Arnoult is the author of the poetry collections INCANTATIONS (Madville Publishing), GALAXIE WAGON and WHAT TRAVELS WITH US (LSU Press) and the novel SUFFICIENT GRACE (Simon & Schuster). Shorter works in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in numerous literary journals. She has been awarded the SIBA Poetry Book of the Year, Weatherford Award, Thomas and Lillie D Chaffin Award, and the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Letters. For 10 years she was writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University where she directed the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, Arts in the Gap, Appalachian Young Writers Workshop, and was a founding editor of Drafthorse Literary Journal. She now lives in Mebane, NC.
Instagram: @darnellarnoult_author
Facebook: @darnellarnoult.author
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Thu, October 16 | 7pm Eastern Time
“PARDON MY HEART”: Celebrating Unapologetic Candor with Rosebud Ben-Oni
“Pardon my heart if it ruins your party,” writes Marcus Jackson. “It’s a large, American heart and has had // a good deal to drink. It’s a pretty bad / dancer—too much feeling, too little technique.” In this workshop, we’ll explore what it means to take up space on the page though it might “ruin the party,” so as to get past self-censorship and one’s own inner demons of fear and doubt. How can you, in times of such troubling uncertainty, unleash unbridled joy onto the page? How can you hit an inner “reset” button and start from a new, fresh perspective that celebrates who you’ve always been, including the good and the bad, the loud and the quiet, the clear and the dim? For inspiration we’ll read poets like Jackson and Ada Limón. We’ll examine different approaches to unleashing your most unbridled candor so that you jump new territory of imagination and fresh pages. You’ll be given writing exercises and poetry prompts, and also takeaways at the end of the lab on how to move forward in your poetry, even in writing of the past, and how to keep curiosity, hope and sheer audacity alive in such trying times.
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections, including the forthcoming The Last Great Adventure is You (Alice James Books, 2027), a sequel to If This is the Age We End Discovery (2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her work has been commissioned by Paramount, the National September 11th Memorial, and the Museum of Jewish Heritage. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Queens Arts Fund, Cafe Royal Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts and CantoMundo. Her work appears in POETRY, APR, The Writer's Chronicle, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Tin House, among others.
Facebook @newyorkrosebud | Instagram @matarose | Twitter @RosebudBenOni | Threads @matarose | Bluesky @rosebudbenoni.bsky.social | TikTok @RosebudBenOni
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Thu, November 20 | 7pm Eastern Time
Somewhere Only We Know: Writing the Collective Voice in Creative Nonfiction with Katie Schmid
The collective first person voice offers writers the ability to summarize a mood, a time, a place and a group of people they've been a part of. It's a troubling way to write: how can we speak for a group, even one of which we are a part? But even so, the technique offers many enticements: when we speak together, we can hide ourselves amongst a crowd of voices, and, paradoxically, reveal a vulnerability that the individual alone may be unable to admit to. Come write with us.
Katie Schmid is a former National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and Writing Freedom Fellow. She's been a finalist for the Ninth Letter prize in Creative Nonfiction, and her book of poems, "Nowhere," was released from the University of New Mexico Press. Instagram @schmiddit
RegisterRegistration closes at 4pm before each session so we can prepare. Please make sure you're subscribed to Strathmore emails to receive the Zoom info.
Check back soon for more information on instructors for the remaining dates.
Seema Reza is the author of the poetry collection A Constellation of Half-Lives and the memoir When the World Breaks Open. Reza has led writing workshops within correctional facilities, military and civilian hospitals, and schools. She is the Executive Director of Mission Belonging (formerly Community Building Art Works or CBAW), a unique arts organization that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care, and socialization among a military population struggling with emotional and physical injuries.