The 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

Adding an event to your sched does not guarantee you a spot in a workshop. Capacity for workshop spaces is 30 people. We recommend arriving as early as possible. In the case a workshop is filled to capacity, please check out some of our other great Festival programming.

In this inclusive community workshop, María Luisa warmly welcomes participants to contemplate family members, one, two or more generations ago, whose fragmented stories have been embraced, silenced or both. Participants should bring any artifacts such as passports, newspaper articles, photos, fragments of songs, even the names of specific scents, among others, to jump-start the generative process. As we speculate about the experiences of blood, adopted, and spiritual family members who came before us, we will generate drafts that may invite participants to code-switch into another language or English vernacular and/or into other culture(s) to better capture voice, tone, and even turns of phrase that do not easily translate into English.