Spring Craft Intensive: Keeonna Harris

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Editor's Note

Family Matters with Keeonna Harris
Thursday, April 6th
3 – 6 PM PST/ 6 PM – 9 PM EST
Online

For many of us our lives are informed by those closest to us; the complexities of familial relationships are difficult to think through and write about. Even when we are not writing directly about our family, the ways we see ourselves and others are deeply informed by those we call family. In this intensive, we explore different entryways to writing about personal relationships with those closest to us. We will read selections from Ashley Ford and Joan Wickersham. Participants will leave this intensive with a set of practical strategies for choosing the best entry way to write complex stories. In our writing exercises we will lean into the discomfort.

BIO: Keeonna Harris is a storyteller, organizer, and mother-of-five. She received her PhD in Justice Studies from Arizona State University, where her dissertation research analyzed the experiences of Black Women navigating motherhood and mass incarceration. She is the recipient of the inaugural 2018-2019 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, the 2021 Tin House Summer Writing Residency, the 2023 Baldwin Center for the Arts Residency, and a 2023 Hedgebrook Writer in Residence. Keeonna has written for Salon.com, and has a chapter in the anthology So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023). Her forthcoming memoir, Mainline Mama (Amistad, 2025), draws from her experiences as a Black woman, teen mother, and twenty years of raising children with an incarcerated partner while building community in the borderlands of the prison.