Writing Along with Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

***Please read the essay in order to best participate in this session. Click here to read!***

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was a self-proclaimed “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” and essayist.  In Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, she reclaims the erotic from its degraded state as pornography within the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and instead sees it as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”  How do we tap into this resource in our lives and work?  In this 2 part workshop, we’ll explore this question and more by close reading Lorde’s essay and writing prompts.  Students will have the option to share their work in a supportive community.

Erica Anzalone is a writer and educator with over eighteen years of teaching experience at the college level. Her book Samsara was the winner of the 2011 Noemi Press Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and a doctorate in English from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where she was awarded a Schaeffer fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Cream City Review, Juked, Pangyrus, baldhip, Coconut, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, Greatcoat, Konundrum Engine Literary Review, Mary, The Offending Adam, Pleiades, Sentence, UCity Review, and elsewhere. Her second poetry manuscript explores the surrealism and simulacra of Las Vegas, and offers both a critique and celebration of American excess. Dr. Anzalone is also the owner and founder of Witch Lit, where she currently teaches creative writing.