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Home / Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference / Schedule / 2019 / Conference Schedule Saturday, February 23, 2019 / Shifting Through Cultural Memory with haydée (hr) souffrant

Conference Schedule 2019

Conference Schedule 2019

Saturday, February 23, 2019, 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Shifting Through Cultural Memory with haydée (hr) souffrant

Date(s): Saturday, February 23, 2019, 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
Location: Tooker, Old Main (view map)
Type(s): Generative Workshop, Presentation, Workshop
Genre and Form(s): Memoir, Mixed Genre, Poetry, Social Justice
Tags: Family, History, Culture, Narrative, The Body, Story

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About the Session

The current trends in contemporary literature reflect a deep sense of using personal narrative and/or cultural history as both text and sites of investigating some of the following questions: How do I heal what's been forced upon my body, my cultural and social communities? How do I use myself as an archive to resolve personal and social conflict? This workshop will ask participants to sift through cultural memories, stories and personal histories to generate poetic text as a form of self-healing. Join writer, haydée (hr) souffrant, as she leads the group in allowing individuals to see the power in writing oneself.

Meet the Presenter(s)

Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference Fellow 2019 Haydée H.R. Souffrant


haydée (hr) souffrant

haydée (hr) souffrant is a Chicago-based Haitian American teaching artist and doula-healer, whose work weaves performance, critical race and radical healing theory to probe the intersections of trauma healing and cultural memory through storytelling and creative writing. As an arts administrator, souffrant’s work through arts programming, healing and creative arts workshops connects multiple identities and cross-cultural communities together in order to create spaces of empathy, healing and social justice for people of color.

souffrant's literary work has been featured in numerous online literary publications at Oberlin College, Hair Trigger Issue 41, Sixty Inches from Center, and her performance work featured at The Whitney Biennale under the Dance Diaspora Collective, Links Hall @ Constellation, Threewalls at Navy Pier and other venues in and around Chicagoland. A graduate of Oberlin College with a BA in African American Studies and English, souffrant is currently an MFA Creative Writing Fiction candidate at Columbia College Chicago.


Learn more about haydée (hr) souffrant