The Course

Home, Away and At Play: Place and Playful Writing Practices

We’re bringing the idea of “tools” back into the workshop! This workshop is for anyone who wants to create a strong sense of place on the page, tell travel stories that inspire environmental action or social justice, and, most importantly, incorporate playful modes and fun tools into their writing practice. We will build a toolkit that will help you start new work, jumpstart an old project, or advance a work-in-progress focused on natural and built environments.

The Duration: This course meets over six consecutive Mondays from 4-7 pm ET, from February 5 – March 11, 2024.

Application window: November 1-15, 2023

The Instructor

Cinelle Barnes is a formerly undocumented memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir and Malaya: Essays On Freedom, and the editor of the New York Times New & Noteworthy book, A Measure Of Belonging: 21 Writers Of Color On The New American South. Her forthcoming travel memoir, Recovering Nation, comes out in 2024. Cinelle earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New York Times, Longreads, Garden & Gun, Coastal Living, Travel + Leisure, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed Reader, Literary Hub, and CNN Philippines, among others. Cinelle was a contributing editor, instructor, and writer at Catapult, and she served as a juror for the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for Memoir. Cinelle’s work has received fellowships and grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, VONA, Kundiman, the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund, the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant, and Capita. Her debut memoir was listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Bustle and nominated for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award.