Types of Creative Writing: Drama, Poetry and Community

In this course we will explore how poetry, drama, and performance can be places and practices where communities can grieve, remember, fight, awaken, reconnect, eat, raise conflict and complex issues, and transform. We will be attentive to how communities are complicated and always changing. We will write different forms of poetry and drama inspired by community-engaged creative projects. We will create our own thoughtful and caring protocols for writing for and with communities. We will be a supportive writing community for each other and push each other to take risks.

Assignments will include: weekly reading responses, weekly writing exercises in poetry and drama, interviews and other research methods, and performance of your work

Possible Texts (not a final list, so please wait until the first day of class to purchase)
Hoʻihoʻi Hou: A Tribute to George Helm and Kimo Mitchell (ed. Rodney Morales), We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival (ed. Andrea Gibson), Salmon is Everything: Community-Based Theater in the Klamath Watershed (Theresa May), Fires in the Mirror (Anna Deavere Smith)
Excerpts from: The Medea Project (Rhodessa Jones), Hulihia: Writings from Prison, On the Edge of Hope and Healing: Flipping the Script on Filipinos in Hawaiʻi, June Jordanʻs Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, Poetry Magazine (April 2016), “Banninur” special food issue of Blackmail Press, and short essays/interviews by Andrea Smith, Aurora Levins Morales, Rev. Bob Nakata, Renée Elizabeth Mzinegiizhigo-Kwe Bédard, Paulo Freire.