Canceled - Writing Workshop with Aimee Nezhukumatathil

The planned visit by Aimee Nezhukumatathil this week is canceled due to health concerns. 

Those registered for the Oct. 19 creative writing workshop will be contacted shortly by Umbrella staff regarding their registration and payments.

We regret any inconvenience, and encourage local literature lovers to continue enjoying other great author events associated with the Concord Festival of Authors.

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The Umbrella Arts Center announces a special, one-day-only creative writing workshop led by New York Times bestselling author and poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Nezhukumatathil will appear in a free public reading and book-signing at The Umbrella on October 17 at 7PM as part of the Concord Festival of Authors. On October 18, she will offer a limited capacity workshop through The Umbrella Arts Education program, in partnership with The Umbrella Arts & Environment program.

Nezhukumatathil’s book World of Wonders was the 2020 Barnes & Noble Book of the year, an NPR Best Book of 2020, and a Kirkus Prize Finalist for Nonfiction. Nezhukumatathil also has four previous poetry collections: Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), Lucky Fish (2011), At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), and Miracle Fruit (2003), the last three from Tupelo Press. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite, a collaboration of epistolary garden poems with the poet Ross Gay. Her writing appears twice in the Best American Poetry Series, The New York Times Magazine, ESPN, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and Tin House.

Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, a Mississippi Arts Council grant, and being named a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. In 2021, she became the first-ever poetry editor for Sierra magazine, the story-telling arm of The Sierra Club. She is professor of English and Creative Writing in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

“That Which Rips Your Heart with Joy: Food Writing as Provocation & Exclamation”

“The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live… So it has been since creation, and it will go on.” —from “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” Joy Harjo

When reading about food or drink, the mind races and rushes for associations and/or remembrances. In most gastronomical writing, food often has a subtext, a layering, or forgive me, a flavor—tinged with grief, joy, shame, desire, or nostalgia.

What gets so often lost or overlooked is the contagious exuberance that can happen when one takes a bite of food and wants to be a student of that dish, even of a singular ingredient—to be curious about where it came from and what it means to have a bridge for people to connect or a place to provoke and reclaim, as poet Thomas Lux once wrote, “…that which rips your heart with joy.”

This workshop will include writing prompts and exercises, and will send you off with notes for several solid first drafts of food writing.

https://theumbrellaarts.org/nez