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Find Your Story Writers Festival

There's No Place Like Home: Writing About Place

Find Your Story is DCPL's annual writing festival with free workshops, author talks, and connection focused on DC's writing community.

Join us at Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library on Saturday, June 8, from 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. for Find Your Story, DC Public Library's annual writers festival. This year's festival will feature poetry, fiction, and non-fiction workshops, led by renowned local writers, around the theme There's No Place Like Home: Writing About Place. The festival will be held on the 4th and 5th floors.

Registration for Find Your Story is recommended, but not required. Join us for what promises to be a great day of writing and community building! 

More information about the day's sessions is below.

Schedule for Find Your Story - There's No Place Like Home: Writing About Place

Workshops 1 | Choose Your Workshop

Title: Rooted in Place with Poetry 
Presenter: Casey Catherine Moore (she/her)  
Workshop Description: This writing workshop reflects on how we can open to nature to fuel our creativity and find depth and meaning in our lives by exploring the intricate relationships between language and the environment. We will read poetry from classic and contemporary authors, including Horace, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Mary Oliver, Rita Dove, and Donika Kelly, to consider what it means to be rooted in place through our language. This workshop provides a space to root your words in the authenticity of nature, allowing your writing to grow organically like the poetry, trees, and plants we’ll draw inspiration from. 
Workshop Location: 401-A 

Workshop Title: A Traveler's Guide to Home 
Presenter: Dubian Campbell 
Workshop Description: Travel writing is a genre of nonfiction writing that encompasses a wide array of diverse forms including memoir,  journalism, travelogs, and travel guide books. Travel writers visit far-away places and write about them, but what happens when we do travel writing on the places most familiar to us? In this workshop we will be learning more about travel writing and writing our own travel guide for the places we call home! 
Workshop Location: 401-D 

Workshop Title: A House is Not a Home Without the People 
Presenters: John Johnson & Courtney Dowe 
Workshop Description: Bring a pen and pad and come create a community story about our home on 2024 Washington Street NW or SE or NE or SW (we will figure out the exact address during the workshop). This will be an interactive workshop where we will use improv, music and creative narrative to explore the rituals of places we call HOME. At the end of our workshop, we will create an original story celebrating home using lived experiences and stories from attending participants. 
Workshop Location: 401-E

Workshops 2 | Choose Your Workshop

Workshop Title: I am a Might Ocean: A Poetry Writing Workshop on Biography and Place
Presenter: Regie Cabico 
Workshop Description: We will look at the construction of poetry word by word, image by image and explore our up-against-the wall moments in our life to create image-rich I AM poems. We will look at place as an anchor for our truth telling stories of resilience and survival. We will look at the works of former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and Button Poetry's Yesika Salgado to create evocative testimony to our courage. This workshop is for the beginner poet and the advanced writer. 
Workshop Location: 401-A 

Workshop Title: Remembering Home 
Presenter: Rachel Coonce  
Workshop Description: Whether it serves as the setting of a story, the driving force for the protagonist, or as a character in itself, the idea of home can be a powerful tool in writing. Home is a place, but it could also be a person, a pet, an object, a food, a song, a feeling… or some combination of these things. Work with an award-winning memoirist to unlock distant memories of home, describe them using all five senses, and build a clearer picture of home from memory fragments. 
Workshop Location: 401-D 

Workshop Title: Write Where You Are 
Presenter: Shannon Sanders 
Workshop Description: In this 50-minute workshop, we will study a piece of published fiction and begin working on something new. We'll start by examining a work that closely engages with place, discussing the details the author uses to situate us in the world of the story; then we'll brainstorm similar details that help to establish place in our own fiction. We'll finish by drafting the beginning of a new piece of work. Participants will be invited (but not required!) to share and receive feedback from the workshop leader! 
Workshop Location: 401-E

Workshops 3 | Choose Your Workshop

Workshop Title: Home is Where the Heart Is: Setting Your Romance
Presenter: Timothy Janovsky 
Workshop Description: From outer space to a contemporary, small town, Timothy Janovsky, author of four published romance novels (Sourcebooks Casablanca and Afterglow Books by Harlequin), leads an interactive workshop discussing the role of setting in romantic fiction. Participants will look at various romance stories from pop culture and beyond to dissect how setting influences tropes, character development, and sizzling on-page chemistry. Through short exercises, writers will come away with the first sparks of their own romantic story. Instagram handle: timothyjanovsky 
Workshop Location: 401-A 

Workshop Title: Crafting Compelling Narratives: Mastering the Three-Act Structure 
Presenter: Dr. Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman 
Workshop Description: Join Dr. Khadijah Z. Ali-Coleman, Poet Laureate of Prince George's County, Maryland, for an immersive workshop on leveraging the power of the three-act structure in your storytelling. In this session, Khadijah will guide participants through the essential elements of the three-act structure and demonstrate how to effectively apply it when crafting short plays for the stage or screen. Drawing from her experience as a 2020 Quadrant Playwright Fellow with Theatre Alliance and a recent residency at the Kennedy Center's REACH with her arts group, Liberated Muse, Khadijah will share practical tips and techniques for creating engaging narratives with clear progression and dramatic tension through outline work and discussion. 
Workshop Location: 401-D 

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