Thursdays on the Stoop is a series of free, virtual writing workshops led for and by our community members. With topics ranging from generative prompts to editing strategies, these informal workshops are sure to shake up your Thursday routine. RSVP below to get the link.

This generative workshop is a space for participants to engage poems that model what daughters are capable of making and unmaking. Through writing prompts, we will work to answer the question: What are you devoted to? This workshop encourages poems that bow to and buck against subjects of devotion like fathers, mothers, lovers, nations, and The World. Participants will leave the workshop having developed maps toward honoring themselves and what they hold dearest.

Hiwot Adilow is an Ethiopian American poet from southwest Philadelphia. Hiwot is co-winner of the 2018 Brunel International African Poetry Prize and author of the chapbooks In the House of My Father (Two Sylvias Press, 2018) and Prodigal Daughter (Akashic Books & African Poetry Book Fund, 2019). Her work appears in Vinyl, Callaloo, The Offing, Reconstructed Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been anthologized in The BreakBeats Poets Vol 2.0: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books, 2018), Best Small Fictions (Sonder Press, 2019), The New Teacher Book (rethinking schools, 2019) and An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry: Volume 3, (20.35 Africa, 2020). Hiwot’s writing has been supported by the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, the Pink Door Writing Retreat, Anaphora Writing Residency, and VONA.

Hiwot holds a BA in Anthropology with a certificate in African Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a member of the First Wave Hip Hop and Urban Arts Learning Community. She also holds a M.Ed. in Early Childhood Education from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.