Threshold of Tongues: Writing from our Ancestral Wombs // with Kashiana Singh and Pramila Venkateswaran

What if someone said you could create powerful, living poetry from both the stories and the silences you carry?

In a time when the world feels increasingly fractured—marked by geopolitical uncertainty, climate crisis, and the shifting sands of identity—poetry offers both anchor and compass. With thoughtful prompts and expert guidance, Kashiana Singh and Pramila Venkateswaran will help you craft poems that draw on ancestral and cultural syntax, inviting sensitivity, honesty, and connection.

This workshop creates space for the stories we carry—those buried in the silences of elders who could not or would not bring them across thresholds of migration, displacement, or trauma.

Through embodied language and intentional writing practices, we’ll call forth these silences and transform them into powerful, living poetry.

For both beginners and experienced poets, the workshop provides a sanctuary to explore the intersections of heritage and the present moment. 

In a world navigating deep uncertainty, Threshold of Tongues becomes a vessel—not just for reflection but for resilience, offering participants a way to yield to the world’s challenges while discovering inspiration in its complexities.

Week by Week

Description of the Panel:

Poetry serves as a portal for those whose heritage has been disrupted by violence, colonization, and displacement. This panel is an invitation to air out the stories we often tuck away in attics, closets, journals, or even deep within our bodies. With discernment, we’ll explore what to salvage, what to unlearn, and what we must leave behind. We will call forth these gnarled stories, finding sound for them and housing them in poetic altars—where they can be honored and reshaped.

Through poetry, texts, and references, this panel will create space for participants and panelists alike to unlearn and rediscover what is essential, grounding, and liberating within our histories.

The stories, whether remembered or forgotten, live inside us, waiting for the right moment to emerge. This panel offers an opportunity to open the doors to these words, rhythms, mantras, and wisdom. While some stories may feel gnarled or deformed by time and trauma, they are no less a source of deep-rooted truth—the truth that transcends data, facts, and historical records, and instead speaks to the unchanging core of who we are.

Join us as we reclaim, reconnect, and reimagine what our heritage can offer in these uncertain times.

The four sessions will flow to and through the following :

Holding Space - Reading from reference texts to ground the discussion –

● How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy

● The Overstory by Richard Powers

● Our Ancestors Did Not Breathe This Air Anthology

● Every Poem Has Ancestors by Joy Harjo

● Ancestors by Ada Limón

● Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo

● “The Aisling” Irish dream poem in which Ireland appears to the poet personified as a woman.

● Poetry of Immigration, Refugees, and Exile

Session 1: Invocation

In this session, we will engage in readings from poets whose works are deeply inspired by ancestral words, languages, and the intricate weave of displacement. These texts will serve as a gateway to understanding how distance and history shape our identities, calling forth the echoes of our ancestors in poetic form.

Session 2: Gazing Inwards

With a ceremonial fishbowl, we’ll invite participants to ask questions that lead us into a still space of deep reflection. This introspective exploration will focus on the roots and root systems of our ancestors—those foundations that nourish our poetic voices. Poems and texts will guide us into this space, helping us integrate both personal and collective histories into the creative process.

Session 3: Going Outwards

Now, we will turn our gaze outward, opening doorways for our participants to bring forth examples of their own communities—folk tales, places, food, and superstitions. Like a collective ritual, the poems generated in Session 2 will be shared and welcomed into the cohort, expanding our understanding of heritage through diverse lenses and experiences.

Session 4: Contemplation

In our final session, we will leave with more than just first drafts of poems—we will carry our bodily and soul selves forward, enriched by the reflections and creative energy of the workshop. Our poems will open new doorways, ushering in fresh creativity and deeper connection to the legacies we’ve explored.

Who Should Take This Class

Poets as keepers will engage with poetry of persistence and resistance. Pathways to our Ancestral systems that ignite memory and hidden narratives. We will gently unbind and trace our roots, roots that have either been axed, twisted, corroded, or displaced. Through these roots, we will start to locate pathways that lead us into the tree system of our ancestors. 

Join us if you are: 

• Interested in ancestral and cultural exploration – People seeking to connect with or better understand their lineage and heritage.

• Engaged in healing or transformative work – Those exploring identity, intergenerational trauma, or self-discovery.

• Writers, poets, and creatives – Especially those who use art as a means of reflection, resistance, or reclamation.

• Educators, historians, or students – Individuals open to alternative narratives that challenge conventional histories.

• Spiritual seekers – Participants drawn to practices that honor intuition, memory, and inherited wisdom.

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 five (5) days before the class start date.

What former students have to say:

“Such rich content.” Leslie

“I wrote something and from something I had tucked away behind years of learned patterns.” Jena

“How refreshing to have two diaspora poets lead these workshops and speak in authentic voices.” Pramila

Format

Class will meet using Zoom on four consecutive Saturdays at 11am EST. 

About the Facilitators

When Kashiana Singh is not writing, she lives to embody her TEDx talk theme of Work as Worship into her every day. Author of 4 collections with Witching Hour released in December 2024 with Glass Lyre Press.

Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island. Author of 8 collections she is a Professor of English at Nassau Community College (SUNY).

Both are actively involved in giving workshops and readings and lead the Matwaala South Asian Diaspora Poetry collective.