The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop Quotes

“What if you broadened your depth of knowledge so that enactments of whiteness and its grammatical tyranny no longer served as the standard for good writing?”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“Whiteness isn’t antithetical to non-whiteness, it’s contingent on it. Creative writing is ethnic studies, is gender and sexual studies, is political science, is religion, is history, is sociology. The dichotomy is a sham. All art is political art. Everything less is denial, denial being the most political of all.”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“I didn't know then that I hated school, only that school hated me, so much so that I bent my brown body into a bow to appease it. I broke out in hives, in teachers because I couldn't yet differentiate my love of learning from the hatred of a white supremacist educational system.”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“The anti-racist model confirms craft as an abstract concept; participants collectively define the workshop vocabulary.”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“Mothering, for me, means willpower, fortitude, grit. It is the transcendent power to multiply oneself, succeeded by the supreme humility to serve that second self.”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“Membership necessitates mutual participation. How can we possibly achieve membership when our presence-the feat of occupying space in brown skin-is deemed illegitimate? We're non-people, exploited for our optics, meant to be seen and not heard. The infrastructure cannot, will not contain us.”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“I didn't know then that I hated school, only that school hated me, so much so that I bent my brown body into a bow to appease it. I broke out in hives, in tears, because I couldn't yet differentiate my love of learning from the hatred of a white supremacist educational system.”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“»​Engage in daily freewriting sessions »​Read their raw, unedited work aloud »​Draw from a living archive of multicultural texts as ready reference »​Honor their artistic mentors by researching a “family tree” of writers, musicians, filmmakers, etc., from whom their writing extends11 »​Publish their work online and/or in a chapbook »​Perform their work at a public venue”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“What if, upon completion of this course, participants: »​Engage in a supportive arts community »​Study one another’s writing to enhance their appreciation of the genre(s) »​Select readings from a living archive of multicultural texts that best inform their individual projects »​Curate their own literary anthologies with texts that appeal to their aesthetic preferences”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“Write in order to achieve their best work »​Manage their ongoing development through regular self-assessment and reflection opportunities »​Pursue creative writing topics of their own choosing »​Experiment with narrative techniques most important to them »​Grow in confidence as writers”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“In the message, I share the story of my past frustrations in workshop, and then counter that narrative with my own approach. Mainly, that I believe that writing is a political act, and in order to honor that offering, we must consciously work against traditions of dominance and control in the creative writing classroom, curating safe spaces for participants to explore race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Don’t worry about being creative, I plead. It’s not about that. It’s about sharing our stories. We must be heard.”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom

“The anti-racist model empowers the author to moderate their own workshop while participants rally in service of the author’s vision.”
― Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom