The 2011 Interdisciplinary Writer’s Lab was an experiment—a productive, beautiful, sometimes messy thing that took a lot of work and made a lot of progress. Together, we created a place to practice and reach new heights, to observe, grow and learn from one another. The 2011 IWL participants dared to step outside their comfort zones, bare their souls, stretch and grow, giving us all goose bumps in the process.
Over the last eight years, participating IWL writers and artists have charted new, cross-disciplinary territory and this year was no exception. The 2011 IWL brought together eleven extremely diverse and talented students with four distinguished instructors, whose backgrounds include a visual artist, a singer/poet, a filmmaker and a storyteller/ performer. Jaime Cortez, Leticia Hernandez, Cheryl Dunye and Brenda Wong Aoki each pushed the students in new directions and gave them new modalities to explore.
In this year’s anthology —a lab, a work in progress— you will experience the fruits of their creative process. Through prose, poetry, playwriting and visual art, the artists will take you on a journey through family generations, distant shorelines, unimaginable questions, and beautifully intimate stories that leave an ache--a good kind of ache--in your chest.
Congratulations to the IWL Class of 2011: Indira Allegra, Maria T. Allocco, Dylan Casama, Erika Céspedes-Kent, Elwin Cotman, Sarah Dayley, Lisa Hsia, Nayomi Munaweera, Jen Palmares Meadows, Ron Ragin, and Jenny Strauss. We hope you enjoy their stories as much as we have.
Rebeka Rodriguez, Program Director
Intersection for the Arts
Ellen Oh, Executive Director
Kearny Street Workshop
Leticia Hernández, Founder
Amate: Women Painting Stories