Threads of Us: family, heritage, and ancestry

There’s a poem inside you that’s been waiting generations to be written. In this workshop, we will explore how family, heritage, and ancestry shape the stories we write and the identities we carry.

You will move through intuitive exercises designed to awaken memory, illuminate cultural lineage, and open imaginative pathways into personal and inherited histories.

We will look closely at poets who engage with ancestry and belonging across different cultural landscapes, including Sarah Howe, Jackie Kay, Imtiaz Dharker, Kimiko Hahn, Ocean Vuong, Yang Lian, and more. We will look at how memory, movement, tradition, and generational echo can serve as guiding touchpoints for our own writing.

By the end of the session, you will leave with new work—fragments, stanzas, or full drafts—that connect the threads of personal history to the wider fabric of familial and ancestral story.

About the facilitator: