Registration is rolling until August 3 at 11:59PM EST. No application is required (except for financial aid— Applications for financial aid are due July 31 at 5PM EST).

$65 w/financial aid available to residents of Greater Philadelphia (Bucks, Camden, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia Counties)

3-hour class: Saturday August 5 12PM-3PM EST

A cross-genre workshop in which we will use various experimental techniques to shake loose and play, to lead you into a new seeing and love of the self. If you were like me as a child, you thought that if the wind blew just hard enough and if you held your arms out strong at just the right angle, you would be able to fly. You knew your body for the wonders and possibilities of it! In this workshop, we imagine the moment of first identifying our belly buttons. We reclaim what others may have teased - a curved back, a lisp, an differently shaped nail - as beautiful. We are beautiful and worthy of delight. Our unique qualities are natural and in tune with the miraculous mundane of the natural world. This is a cross-genre workshop in which we will use various experimental techniques to shake loose and play, drawing on readings from writers like Bettina Judd, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Laurie Ann Guerrero among others. Movement based meditation, online magnet poetry, random word generators, collage techniques, and more will lead you into a new seeing and love of the self.

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 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.