Recent Activities

Mohamedou Ould Slahi (the author of Guantánamo Diary) and I offered a creative writing workshop at the international conference "Camps, Writing, and Abolition Democracy," which took place in Graz, Austria from June 4-7th, 2026. 

The workshop began with a discussion in which we discussed strategies for dealing with writer's block and ways of integrating play and the unknown into the writing process. By the end of our session, everyone had written a pantoum, many of which were beautiful.

The conference was co-sponsored by the University of Graz and the University of Puerto Rico's Rio Piedras Campus.  We're planning to put together a collection featuring some of the poems from this workshop. 

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On June 13th, I participated in the Poetry Marathon and wrote a poem per hour for 24 hours (you can also do one an hour for 12 hours if you are participating in the half marathon). 762 poets participated. The project provides prompts, a forum, and other support. It was a challenge, but I completed the task and finally have a lot of short poems, including several tanka, which is something I've also wanted.

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