Self-Advocacy for BIPOC Students

The Center for Arts + Social Justice, in collaboration with the Office of DEI’s Industry and Me Empowerment for BIPOC series, presents “Self-Advocacy for BIPOC Students,” a workshop with Felicia Rose Chavez, author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom.

In this dynamic seminar, we’ll survey the highlights of an anti-racist creative writing pedagogy, empowering students to claim ownership of not only their work, but their working relationships with professors and peers. The 90-minute session offers practical takeaways to re-conceptualize critique and encourage everyday anti-racist action. In the culminating question-and-answer exchange, we will address how students of color need a community to which we belong and feel safe; we need it, but we don’t always know how to ask for it and are often unaware that alternatives exist. Together we will discuss self-care as a means of self-advocacy.

This free workshop is open to students and alumnx who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), and all students and alumnx who wish to support BIPOC artists. To register, please email [email protected] for registration instructions.

This series also will include a public reading by Chavez on September 22 and another workshop: “Self-Advocacy for Students” (open to all current VCFA students and alumnx) on September 23. Click the event names to learn more and register in advance.

Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the  University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom and co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT. Felicia’s teaching career began in Chicago, where she served as Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founded GirlSpeak, a feminist webzine for high school students. She went on to teach writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was distinguished as the Most Innovative Instructor of the Year; the University of Iowa, where she was distinguished as the Outstanding Instructor of the Year; and Colorado College, where she received the Theodore Roosevelt Collins Outstanding Faculty Award. Her creative scholarship earned her a Ronald E. McNair Fellowship, a University of Iowa Graduate Dean’s Fellowship, a Riley Scholar Fellowship, and a Hadley Creatives Fellowship. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, she  currently serves as Creativity and Innovation Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College. For more information about The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, and to access (and add to) a multi-genre compilation of contemporary writers of color, please visit www.antiracistworkshop.com.

More About the Workshop: “We’ll discuss how to resist silencing as a strategy to maintain authority over one another (and even ourselves). Instead, we’ll aim to self-advocate via a pedagogy of deep listening: listening to our fears and desires around artmaking, listening to our intuition about a vision for a project, listening to our preferred artistic mentors as guide, listening to and honoring one another’s work without imposing our individual aesthetic values, and finally listening to (and untangling) the technical, creative, and emotional needs surrounding our work. We’ll address individual workshop techniques, peer review techniques, small group and large group workshop techniques, and one-on-one conferencing with a professor/mentor/professional colleague. A few of the techniques will be explicitly about page work, others are applicable across the arts spectrum. Regardless of the labels that I use, I encourage participants to expand beyond a narrow perspective of genre so that they might dream up ways to apply these techniques to their own practice.” — Felicia Rose Chavez