TLA Network upcoming events

Changing the World With Words: TLA Foundations // with Amanda Lacson (28 October 2026)

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

This thorough introduction to Transformative Language Arts (TLA) encompasses the personal and the global, the contemporary and the historic, and how TLA can be practiced through writing, storytelling, performance, song, and collaborative, expressive and integrated arts.

We will also explore ethics and considerations for practicing TLA through facilitation, coaching, teaching, and more, with special attention to diversity and inclusion when it comes to bringing more voices to the table.

Each week includes short readings, a lively discussion, and invigorating writing prompts to help you articulate more of your own TLA callings. The weekly writing prompts and pertinent discussion questions give you room to work and play through what you know, are coming to know, and how this knowledge cross-pollinates with what you do and who you are. Websites, videos and/or podcasts, and essays to engage with, bring you face to face with you real-life expressions of TLA as this field, profession, and calling grows around the world.

You can order a copy of The Power of Words: A TLA Reader, the required text for class), here.

This class is required for TLA Foundations Certification.

Week by Week

Week One: TLA History, Fields, and Traditions

An overview of theory and practice, including genres, arts and community practices, ethics, and your own values informing your TLA. Explore TLA in many forms–from poetry therapy to social change theater to healing storytelling–and share what ignites your soul and work. We’ll also look at how we see ourselves in our TLA work and callings and how we’re likely to seen in various communities, and the essential role of self-care in our TLA work and as core to TLA practice.

Week Two: TLA in Service: Health, Healing, Spirituality, and Personal Growth.

We’ll explore how TLA can help people find their way home through health or emotional crises or wounds, spiritual callings, and many manner of personal growth. Starting with the personal, and recognizing how the personal is political, we look at ways in which TLA can foster health, healing, and homecoming, and also some of our cultural biases and blindnesses about such directions. Some of this week’s resources will help us see more of the breadth and depth in how TLA can be effective in various religious and spiritual traditions, mainstream and holistic healing practice, and home-grown and psychological counseling as well as for people living with disabilities or serious illnesses.

Week Three: TLA as Catalyst: Community, Culture, History, and Social Change.

We’ll look at TLA in relation to community-building, culture-shifting, history-revisioning, and social change, and particularly explore what it means and can mean to be part of various communities. To better understand the time and place where we live now, we’ll also explore TLA as a vehicle for diversity and inclusion, including addressing oppression, marginalization, privilege, and access. Additionally, we’ll look at what it means to practice TLA in ways that foster a community ethic of care (as well as supporting individual self-care).

Week Four: TLA & Right Livelihood: Ways to Make a Living and a Life.

What are our callings for how we make a living and how we live a life? We’ll dive into how TLA intersects with our life’s work (whether that work relates to a paycheck, volunteering, creating art or writing, or other aspects of our life), and develop plans for where we’re led to go. We’ll draw from the Buddhist roots of the term “Right Livelihood” to better understand how we can forge good work that makes a positive contribution to our communities and lives.

Week Five: TLA in Action: Facilitation, Consulting, Collaboration, Coaching, and More.

Looking at the ethics and facilitation of our work, art, and community involvement, we’ll discuss and write about the specific forms of TLA we do and want to do, and how strong facilitation of TLA – whether in the form of community meetings, writing workshops, collaborative storytelling or theater projects, or one-on-one coaching – requires us to lifelong students of the art of facilitation.

Week Six: TLA and You: Plans, Visions, and Maps.

Deepening our plans for the work, art, and community-making ahead, we’ll clarify what’s right for us to pursue next, what support and tools we need along the way, and the future envision. This week will focus on what resources and pathways are around us, and how to best discern our own best ways to move forward.

Who Should Take This Class

This class is ideal for a wide variety of people, including professionals who want to infuse TLA into their teaching, counseling, pastoral work, arts collaboration, and community work; community leaders and activists seeking to bring more voice and vision to the table in their communities; and writers, storytellers, performers and other artists who want to develop their facilitation of writing, songwriting, expressive arts, drama therapy and community theater, collaborative arts, storytelling, and integrated arts; and perspective or current students or alumni of TLA studies.

If cost is a barrier, we offer scholarships based on income as well as some partial scholarships for people living with serious illness and/or disability or people of color. Please fill out this scholarship application form so that we can find the best way to make the class accessible to you.

Please note: Registration closes Oct. 23, 2026—five (5) days before the class start date.

Where and When Will This Course Meet?

This is an online class which will be taught via the online platform, Wet Ink. Each week, a new week will open full of resources, reflections, discussion questions, and writing prompts. Note: No class the week of Nov. 23.

Students should expect to spend a minimum 4-6 hours per week perusing resources and readings, answering a discussion question, engaging in several writing prompts, and responding to peers’ work. From our interactions, we sustain a welcoming and inspiring community together.

We will have three optional Zoom meetings. These meetings will be an opportunity to check in with the facilitator, discuss the material and meet with your classmates. Zoom meetings will not be recorded. They will take place on the following Saturdays at 12:00 - 1:30 PM ET (11 AM-12:30 PM CT/10-11:30 AM MT/9-10:30 AM PT):

Saturday, October 31
Saturday, November 21
Saturday, December 12

Required Text: The Power of Words: A Transformative Language Arts Reader, edited by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Janet Tallman. You can purchase the text through Amazon.

Supplemental Text: Transformative Language Arts in Action, edited by Ruth. A. Farmer and Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. You can purchase this text on Amazon or Rowman and Littlefield.

About the Facilitators

Amanda Faye Lacson (she/hers) is a Filipina-American writer, photographer and historian. She examines how our identities are shaped, how they impact the way we move in the world, and how we write our history through her creative nonfiction and playwriting; photography documenting the artistic process; oral history-oriented podcast interviewing; and by creating and facilitating community-based workshops for the family historian. Amanda is a board member and Membership co-chair of the Transformative Language Arts Network; writer, performer and director with the Playful Substance theater company; and producer, host and editor of Goddard in the World Podcast. She is also the founder of FamilyArchive Business, a studio designed to support the family historian at any point in the archiving process, from organizing photos in boxes to creating a final product to share with the family.

Recent projects include: writing and performing work based on her experience as a Pinay child and mother in the devised theater piece Raised Pinay: The 5^th Generation; presenting a generative writing workshop on using Transformative Language Arts to create and deepen one’s family archive at the TLAN Power of Words conference; writing a satirical monologue from the perspective of Christopher Columbus reckoning with his legacy in the afterlife, for Playful Substance; and photographing classical Indian dance performance by Brooklyn Raga Massive for Chelsea Factory. Keep up with Amanda's work at amandafayelacson.com.

Gathering Our Ghosts: Writing, Memory, and Creative Dialogue with the Dead // with Sharon Pajka (28 October 2026)

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

As autumn deepens and the veil between worlds grows thin, Gathering Our Ghosts invites writers and artists to step into the shadowed spaces where memory, grief, and imagination meet.

This six-week Transformative Language Arts course centers ghost stories, poems, and haunting texts as portals for exploring death awareness, remembrance, and ongoing relationship with the dead. Rather than seeking closure, participants are encouraged to dwell in uncertainty, listening for what lingers, whispers, and refuses to disappear.

Through guided discussion, reflective writing, ritualized storytelling, and collaborative dialogue, participants will engage language as a transformative tool for inquiry and connection. Writing practices include letters to the dead, elegiac fragments, invocations, and collective ghost stories, allowing participants to experiment with creative dialogue across time and absence. Visual art and symbolic practices further support embodied reflection and ethical imagination.

Grounded in care-centered facilitation and community engagement, the course creates a supportive container for exploring personal, ancestral, cultural, and imagined ghosts.

Participants will practice deep listening, respectful witnessing, and consent-based sharing while engaging difficult and tender material. The course emphasizes reflection, relationship, and meaning-making over answers or resolution.

Gathering Our Ghosts affirms that when we tell ghost stories, our own and those passed down, we strengthen our connection to the living world. By writing with and to our ghosts, participants cultivate creative resilience, deepen their artistic practice, and discover how language can hold what is unresolved, sacred, and still speaking.

Week by Week

Week 1 (Oct. 28): Summoning & Silence — Who Are Our Ghosts?

We begin at the threshold, where the veil thins and voices begin to stir. Through ghost stories, poems, and visual texts, participants engage in reflective practice by naming the ghosts that haunt their personal, cultural, and imaginative landscapes. Language becomes an invocation calling forth memories, absences, and presences while group discussion establishes a shared ethic of care for engaging death awareness and creative uncertainty.

Week 2 (Nov. 4): Memory & Murmurs — Grief as a Living Archive

This week lingers with what refuses to disappear. Ghostly texts guide participants into an exploration of grief as a living archive stored in objects, places, and half-remembered stories. Through expressive writing and reflective inquiry, participants practice attending to murmurs of the past, allowing fragmentation, silence, and echo to shape creative work and deepen understanding of loss as an ongoing presence.

ZOOM SESSION

Week 3 (Nov. 11): Correspondence & Conversations — Writing to the Unreachable

Here we write across impossible distances. Drawing on spectral letters, laments, and ghost stories, participants engage writing as relational and transformative practice. Through care-centered rituals of correspondence, writers experiment with addressing those who cannot answer, cultivating ethical imagination while allowing language to carry longing, unanswered questions, and the unsettling intimacy of continued conversation with the dead.

Week 4 (Nov. 18): Rituals & Remains — Art as Remembrance

This week turns toward the remains, ancestral, collective, and imagined, that shape our stories. Through haunting narratives and ritual-inflected texts, participants explore how creative acts become containers for grief and memory. Writing and multimodal practices emphasize symbolic language, shared witnessing, and cultural care, inviting ghosts to be honored through intentional storytelling rather than explained away.

Week 5 (Dec. 2): Darkness & Dialogue — Shared Ghost Stories

Ghost stories are rarely told alone. This week centers communal storytelling and dialogue as transformative practice. Participants gather in shared darkness to read, listen, and contribute their own ghostly narratives, engaging language as a tool for collective inquiry into mortality and grief. Emphasis is placed on deep listening, consent, and the power of being haunted together without the need for resolution.

ZOOM SESSION

Week 6 (Dec. 9): Blessings & Beginnings — Living with Our Ghosts

We close by considering which ghosts we carry forward. Through lingering stories where the dead remain as guides, companions, or quiet witnesses, participants reflect on transformation and integration. Writing and ritual support the articulation of ongoing relationships with the unseen, affirming language as a living practice that allows us to walk onward—changed, accompanied, and attentive to what still whispers.

Who Should Take This Class

Writers, poets, artists, and anyone drawn to the spooky vibes of the season. All backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome.

If cost is a barrier, we offer scholarships based on income as well as some partial scholarships for people living with serious illness and/or disability or people of color. Please fill out this scholarship application form so that we can find the best way to make the class accessible to you.

What People Are Saying About Learning With Sharon:

"I already miss this class for the depth, creativity and intimacy of the subject matter, our facilitator and classmates, and the safety provided. I am very grateful to TLA; Sharon P. our facilitator; and all my classmates for a rewarding, informative and challenging experience."

"LOVED this class, and the instructor. Would love to learn more in follow up class."

"How fascinating, intriguing and rewarding the subject matter was; and how accepted and truly connected I felt — with the facilitator and classmates; especially considering my current level of writing and participation (first class)."

Where and When Does This Course Meet?

This is an online course, hosted on the online teaching platform, Wet Ink and includes two Zoom sessions.

This course meets online in a Wet Ink classroom for six weeks from Wednesday, October 28 through Tuesday, December 15, 2026 supported by two Zoom sessions (dates and times TBA). (No class the week of Nov. 23.)

The week before class begins, registrants will receive an invitation to the Wet Ink classroom and the Zoom session information.

The Wet Ink platform allows students to log in on their own time to post comments and critiques directly to authors’ works. You can also view deadlines, track revisions, and watch video or listen to audio. At the end of the class, each student will receive an email that contains an archive of all their content and interactions. Wet Ink is mobile-friendly and there are no browser requirements.

About the Teacher

Sharon Pajka is a Professor of English. She holds a Ph.D. in English Education and a graduate certificate in Public History. Her writing combines a love of words and the stories of those who came before us. She is the author of Women Writers Buried in Virginia (2021) The Souls Close to Edgar Allan Poe: Graves of His Family, Friends and Foes (2023), winner of the 2024 Saturday Visiter Awards by Poe Baltimore, and Haunted Virginia Cemeteries (2025).

On the weekends, you can find her in the cemetery volunteering, giving history tours, researching and writing about cemeteries. Find more information on her website: https://www.sharonpajka.com/

THE INNER CRITIC IS NOT YOUR ANCESTOR! A Language Lab in Voice, Revision, and the Craft of Authorial Authority // with Tasjha Wanonah Dixon (28 October 2026)

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

Every writer hears internal commentary while composing. The craft question is not whether those voices exist—but which ones deserve editorial authority.

Writing rarely emerges fully formed.

Instead, it develops through a dynamic process of drafting, questioning, revising, and reshaping. During this process many writers encounter internal commentary—voices that challenge tone, structure, word choice, and authority.

Some of these voices sharpen the work. Others interrupt it.

This six-week writing studio examines the relationship between creative voice and editorial craft.

Rather than attempting to silence internal criticism, the course explores how writers can transform internal dialogue into a productive revision process.

Participants will consider how attention and discernment influence creative authority.

At its core, however, the course focuses on craft development.

Participants will explore techniques for refining voice, shaping tonal range, structuring individual pieces, and organizing writing into a cohesive manuscript.

Over six weeks participants compose and revise a small body of work that becomes a personal chapbook manuscript.

The final session focuses on sequencing and manuscript design so that participants leave the course with a coherent chapbook draft ready for further revision or publication.

Week By Week

Weekly Craft Inquiry Zones

Week 1: Voice and Tonal Signature

How writers develop a recognizable stylistic presence.

Week 2: Editorial Discernment

Distinguishing productive editorial instincts from restrictive self-censorship.

Week 3: Tonal Range

Exploring shifts in emotional register and narrative perspective.

Week 4: Structural Revision

Refining individual pieces through deliberate structural choices.

Week 5: Manuscript Cohesion

Selecting and revising work that contributes to a unified collection.

Week 6: Chapbook Assembly

Sequencing and organizing writing into a cohesive manuscript.

Course Format

Most craft instruction takes place asynchronously on the Wet Ink platform.

Participants engage with weekly craft materials, examples, and writing explorations on their own schedule throughout the week.

The weekly Zoom gatherings are not instructional lectures. Instead they function as community literary salons where participants share writing developed during the week and listen closely to one another’s work.

These sessions emphasize observation, reflection, and creative community rather than formal instruction.

These hybrid online classes are hosted on the Wet Ink teaching platform with additional live sessions on Zoom. The Zoom sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants.

Students will receive an invitation to the Wet Ink platform the day before the course begins.

Wet Ink allows participants to post writing, respond to peers, track revisions, and access weekly craft materials.

Live Zoom sessions take place Fridays from 1:30–3:30 PM CST and will be recorded for participants who cannot attend in real time.

Who Finds Their Way Into This Class?

This studio often attracts writers who are fascinated by how drafts become finished work.

Participants frequently include:

poets preparing their first chapbook manuscript
essayists shaping personal writing into cohesive collections
academics interested in developing a stronger authorial voice
journal writers ready to transform private writing into crafted pieces
experienced writers seeking a structured environment for revision

You may find this course especially useful if you have ever:

accumulated many drafts but struggled to organize them into a collection
wondered how writers develop a distinctive voice over time
been curious about the editorial decisions behind published books
wanted to better understand how revision shapes finished writing

Participants do not need extensive writing experience. What matters most is curiosity about the craft decisions that transform drafts into finished work.

What people are saying about learning with Tasjha:

"Radiant"

"Magnetic"

"Devotee"

"Unapologetically Hilarious"

"Visionary Leader"

"The BEST facial expressions!" (I love that one!)

Where and When Does this Online Course Meet?

These hybrid online classes are hosted on the Wet Ink teaching platform with additional live sessions on Zoom.

Students will receive an invitation to the Wet Ink platform the day before the course begins.

Wet Ink allows participants to post writing, respond to peers, track revisions, and access weekly craft materials.

Live Zoom sessions take place Fridays from 1:30–3:30 PM CST and will be recorded for participants who cannot attend in real time.

About the Facilitator

Tasjha Wanonah Dixon is a writer, educator and spoken word poet who approaches language as both craft and catalyst. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and is a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT-500). Her teaching explores how words function in the world—how they capture attention, shape narrative, challenge assumptions, and invite new ways of seeing. Through studio-based writing courses and spoken word laboratories, Tasjha encourages participants to study the architecture of language while developing their own creative authority. She is the founder of Empowering KC, a creative practice dedicated to writing, community dialogue, and embodied awareness. Her work invites writers to approach language not only as expression, but as a deliberate act of design.

Thought→Word→Deed: Questioning Language Can Be a Powerful Tool for Creating a Better Future // with Lisa Maroski (28 October 2026)

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 04:00:00 GMT

You have used language your whole life. Have you stopped to think about how it uses you?

In this class we will inquire into the workings of language itself—its assumptions, structures, limitations, and possibilities.

By considering those aspects of language that we take for granted, we can think about and then speak into being a better future for ourselves and others.

How? We use language to create our social structures, including government (laws), commerce (contracts), education (lessons), entertainment (books, movies), and even our relationships with others.

For example, laws and contracts specify which rights and responsibilities people have. Specific words ritually enacted determine who is married. To create a more just, equitable, and sustainable world, we must not only question our personal and cultural assumptions about language but also examine how injustice, war, and one-sidedness are built into the very structures of our language (English). Then, most importantly, we can imagine new structures.

For example, the shape of our human bodies (head on top, eyes on front, left/right symmetry) influences not just the way we perceive but also the way we think (e.g., higher is better). Imagine having the shape and perception of an octopus; how might you perceive and think differently?

Through readings, discussions, and creative activities, we explore the interconnectedness of various aspects of language via philosophy, linguistics, and science, even guided meditation and art!

This course is based on the instructor’s Nautilus award-winning book, Embracing Paradox, Evolving Language: Expressing the Unity and Complexity of Integral Consciousness.

Week By Week

Each session will have a didactic part, discussion, and activity, except week 8, which will focus on integrating the elements of the course. Participants are expected to read 10-20 pages of text before the next session (starting with week 2), so that the discussion can be engaging for everyone.

The ultimate goal of this course is:

A shift of perspective, which could translate into personal and professional life—they go together hand-in-hand—as greater empathy and more willingness to question the status quo and who or what it serves.
Second, by developing a capacity for asking deeper questions, participants will develop skills to transcend the standard problem-solution paradigm.
Third, by seeing how metaphors are built into literal language (e.g., Time Is Money; Progress Is Good; Crime Is A Beast) and consequently structure the way we think, participants will be able to subtly introduce new ways of thinking into their profession.

Week 1: Overview of the course. Introduction to polarities and supplementarities. On the importance of asking penetrating questions. Activity—Drawing on the idea behind Vision Boards, participants will create a Question Board, which will empower them to deepen their question-asking capacity.

Week 2: To better understand polarities, either/or thinking, and both/and thinking, we will explore the implications of Mobius strips and Klein bottles. Activity—make your own Mobius strip and its offspring.

Week 3: Introduction to the interconnected aspects of language (words, syntax, semantics, logic, metaphors, categories, and culture) and how they all work together to maintain the status quo. Activity—draw/diagram your conception of the relations among those aspects.

Week 4: More on metaphors. They’re not just for poetry—we reason using metaphors too! Activity—create a project that applies what you are learning here to some area of your life that is important to you (and hopefully also important for all Life). The project will draw on ideas from your Question Board and continue to refine key questions. The project can be something in personal and/or professional life, such as improving a relationship with a family member or coworker, or something in public life, such as raising awareness about an issue that you’re passionate about. It can be something doable in the final four weeks or something open-ended. Participants will be put into breakout rooms to help each other develop and refine their ideas for a project.

Week 5: Picking up another thread from week 3, we’ll go into more depth about systems thinking and perspective-taking, -seeking, and -integrating. Activity—some perspective-taking role-playing exercises. These powerful exercises can be used in life to foster understanding, build community, and develop collective wisdom.

Week 6: What other languages have that English doesn’t. Examples will be gleaned from linguistic anthropology. If participants are fluent in other languages, they will be invited to share about them. Activity—questions and conversation about projects, to keep them on track.

Week 7: Inspiration from conlanging (making constructed language). I will show excerpts from the movie Conlanging: The Art of Crafting Tongues. This movie is highly inspirational and shows examples of profound creativity vis à vis language. Discussion—differences between inventing entirely new languages and innovating our existing language(s).

Week 8: Participants will share the projects they have worked on during the class, and together re-weave the threads from the previous sessions. Doing this collectively enables participants to perceive a “whole” that might look different than the one they wove for themselves. Participants will be encouraged to share what they got out of the class and/or how they expect to continue using the material in the future.

Materials required: Embracing Paradox, Evolving Language: Expressing the Unity and Complexity of Integral Consciousness, notebook, drawing pad and pens (analog or digital), scissors.

As a way to foster community, I will be available via Zoom for “office hours” at various times throughout the course (so that participants with schedule conflicts can potentially visit). Participants can stop by to ask questions, brainstorm, or just chat.

Book ordering info…

There is a 25% discount available to students. Click the button below to order at the discounted price.

Order Embracing Paradox, Evolving Language

Who Should Take This Course?

People who:

are concerned about the decline in civility, truth, sensemaking, and/or the increase in polarization of current society.
are frustrated with the exclusionary either/or frameworks (either you’re with us or against us,etc), such as social activists, educators, corporate or nonprofit leaders.
know that old systems are collapsing but aren’t sure how to build new systems that don’t recreate the problems of the old system.
want to find radically new ways to be creative with their writing.
aren’t content to simply use language but also want to reform, reinvent, revise, or reimagine language itself.

What people are saying about learning with Lisa:

"Lisa has such breadth. She can be talking about Plato one minute and microbiology they next!" --John D.

"I enjoyed the discussions in this class. She has a way of making us feel like we matter." --Alane W.

"Lisa pushed me out of my comfort zone. I now have a much wider view of things." --Akbar

Where and When Does this Online Course Meet?

This hybrid online course is hosted on the Wet Ink teaching platform with additional live "office hours" hosted via Zoom.

Students will receive an invitation to the Wet Ink platform the day before the course begins. The facilitator will provide information about the times for the Zoom office hours.

Wet Ink allows participants to post writing, respond to peers, and access resource materials.

About the Facilitator

Lisa Maroski has been an editor, author, playwright, and writing and innovation instructor. She taught scientists to improve their grant- and article-writing skills, has presented at and organized conferences about consciousness, appeared on many different podcasts, just began to host her own podcast called Language Portals, and has facilitated various sessions and book discussions for the Monterey Friends of C.G. Jung. Lisa is trained in Polarity Management and to host Warm Data Labs.

Website: https://lisamaroski.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-maroski-3867128/

Academia.edu: https://brynmawr.academia.edu/LisaMaroski

Reframe, Reclaim: Poetry as a Healing Path to a Happier Heart // with Kiesa Kay (05 December 2026)

Sat, 05 Dec 2026 20:00:00 GMT

"This workshop heals hearts and forges friendships."

Reframe, Reclaim: Poetry as a Healing Path to a Happier Heart is a two-hour workshop exploring poetry as a means to healing.

Following an ice-breaker, meditation and a short stretching (yoga) exercise, we’ll discuss how focusing specifically on one moment or detail in trauma can give us the tools to overcome and move through that experience.

We’ll alternate responding to writing prompts and sharing our work and conclude by exploring how to create a blended practice for health and healing as well as how to create an effective regular schedule for that practice.

If you take one thing away with you from these two hours, “Let it be empowerment to create and sustain a peaceful haven for your feelings.”

What You Will Experience

Through this experience, you will:

Understand and appreciate poetry as a dynamic healing tool.
Learn to go deeply into the specifics of a single moment in order to reclaim joy.
Discover delight in simplicity even in chaotic times.
Have the opportunity to create the seed of a poem from a dynamic writing prompt.
Determine a regular time to maintain and sustain a healing writing practice.

Note: You are also welcome to use the time to explore visual art. Sometimes it's easier to draw or paint or scribble than to find words at first. The artwork then will become the seed of a later poem.

Who Is This Workshop For?

Writers seeking peaceful feelings and who have experienced losses will benefit.

The TLA Network offers scholarships based on income as well as some partial scholarships for people living with serious illness and/or disability or people of color. Please fill out this scholarship application form so that we can find the best way to make the class accessible to you.

What people are saying about learning with Kiesa:

Thank you for all the inspiration!

What a wonderful presentation and so helpful for anyone with a hidden disability!

Reordering how we think of ourselves is so key....

Where and When Does this Workshop Meet?

This workshop will be presented Saturday, August 1, 2026 from 3-5PM ET/ 2-4 PM CT/ 1-3 PM MT/ 12-2PM PT / 7-9 PM UTC as a one-time, two-hour Zoom session. The event will be recorded and shared with with anyone registered for Reframe, Reclaim: Poetry as a Healing Path to a Happier Heart .

About the Facilitator

Kiesa Kay, poet and playwright, created a video series on Transforming Trauma through Creative Expression for Survivor Space. Her master's thesis was on using creativity as a healing tool for survivors of violence. Her website is kiesakay.wixsite.com/courage.