About the Workshop

This generative poetry workshop will be a collaboration with our living and dead: an experiment in writing relationally, remembering capaciously, and speculating lovingly in the face of archival erasure. As we explore the beauties and difficulties of writing with queer community, we will reckon with our “we”: the writers who have helped us become the poets we are, the community members that kept us alive in impossible times, our family by blood/choice/beyond that binary. However, especially in queer contexts, lineage is often not so simple. What to do with ancestors we love despite the ways they harmed us or participated in our erasure? How do we face colonially-induced absences in queer/trans archives, and what might poems offer us as vehicles to imagine, and relate to, potential queer histories?

This workshop will tackle these questions with generative writing exercises, both individual and collaborative, as well as class discussions weaving theory and practice. Readings may include a mix of theorists and poets such as Zaina Alsous, June Jordan, Trish Salah, Jennifer Tseng, Noor Hindi, Essex Hemphill, Ariella Azoulay, Dionne Brand, Frank Bidart, Danez Smith, Tommy Pico, Chase Berggrun, and more, with a focus on queer/trans writers of color + from the Global South.

About the Instructor

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, critic, and performance artist. They are the author of When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America (Haymarket, 2026) and Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020), which won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are the Editor-at-Large of Mizna, and co-editor of HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket, 2025), which was long-listed for the Palestine Book Award. They are a graduate of Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program, and teach at Amherst College as a Writer-in-Residence.