Registration is rolling until July 26 at 11:59PM EST. No application is required (except for financial aid— Applications for financial aid are due July 21 at 5PM EST).

$250 w/financial aid available to residents of Greater Philadelphia (Bucks, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties)

4 week class: Mondays 6-8PM EST, 7/31, 8/7, 8/14, 8/21 (with optional make up date on 8/28)

This program interrogates what it means to live as a writer, which includes incorporating a daily practice of writing and learning to read the literary world. We will explore elements of a writer’s portfolio like the bio, artist statement, project proposal, writing samples, and submission cover letter. Within the writing community that we establish together, we will assemble and offer feedback on submission packets. We will write, submit, praise and challenge one another in the craft, support one another in social media (if one chooses to explore social media) and learn strategies for getting our work from the page to the world where it belongs.

This program is designed for students who have a significant body of work and a strong interest in continuing their growth in the writing profession through publishing, fellowships, residencies, and/or an MFA or alternative writing program. You do not need to have an MFA or the intention to enroll in an MFA for this program. All writers are welcome, whether you have 10 poems, 3 short stories, or a new book! To clarify, this program will NOT include editing or formal workshopping. Instead, this program is focused on moving work that is polished and completed to the final stages of publication or other arenas in the writing profession.

Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape ancestral lands). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of black god mother this body, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, sombra : (dis)locate, and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She publishes across forms in visual art, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly work. She has received fellowships and residencies with the Obsidian Foundation, Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there. She supports poets and writers at the Stonecoast MFA at the University of Southern Maine. She is additionally a digital archivist, emerging visual artist, writing coach, and curriculum developer.