Step 1: Donate to Wesam’s family here (sugg. donation $40).

Step 2: Register for “Animal Poetics” here.

What happens when an animal enters a poem? This one-session generative workshop features close reading exercises and prompts that encourage poems to transform into habitats where animals can roam. We will read poems by Natalie Diaz, Alycia Pirmohamed, and Gregory Orr among others and pay particular attention to enlivening animals beyond iconography in writing towards faith.

Amogha is a poet and lyric essayist. Her work has recently appeared in Poetry Northwest, Split Lip Magazine, Stanchion Zine and Fahmidan Journal. She was a finalist for the 2024 Sewanee Review poetry contest. She lives and writes on the unceded land of the Lək̓wəŋən peoples in Victoria, BC. Find her on Twitter @amocalypse and on Bluesky at @oracleatdelphi.bsky.social.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $35).

Step 2: Register for “Tip of the Spear: A Reading Group” here.

Join Medievalists for Palestine for a reading group on Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt during their conference, Open Access Medieval Studies: Liberation, which will run counter to the Centennial Meeting of the Medieval Academy.

We will discuss Burton’s approach to the archives, which he calls “archival war,” and think critically about the ethical obligations of medieval and historical research practices. We will also discuss how counterinsurgent strategies of the state are replicated in academia — including but not limited to medieval studies.

This will also be a space where participants can think together about what practices can effectively fight these regimes of repression.

Participants are encouraged to purchase Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear from the Workshops4Gaza bookstore, where all proceeds from books are donated to a different Gaza initiative each month.

Medievalists for Palestine (MfP) is a non-hierarchical, leaderless collective of early period scholars advocating for Palestinian liberation. MfP supports the call for BDS and to end Israel’s occupation and colonization of Palestine. It rejects the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism and amplifies the work of groups struggling for and supporting Palestinian liberation.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $30).

Step 2: Register for “Editing Yourself and Others” here.

In this fun and informative workshop, writer and translator Jen Calleja will lead participants in a discussion and series of exercises around the editing process. How do we approach re-drafting and editing our work? What are important things to remember when editing other people's work? How can we edit translations, including and especially when we can't read the original language? 

Jen Calleja is an author, publisher and literary translator from German. Her books include the memoir-essay collection Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode  (Rough Trade Books, 2024), the novel Vehicle (Prototype, 2022), and the long-form poem Dust Sucker (Makina Books, 2023). She was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Marion Poschmann's The Pine Islands. She is co-publisher at Praspar Press, which supports Maltese literature in English and English translation. Her latest translation is Milk Teeth by Helene Bukowski from MTO Press.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $30).

Step 2: Register for “How to Talk to Kids About Palestine” here.

In this workshop, illustrator Nathi Ngubane will discuss art as a tool for education and communication, and how adults can talk to children about Palestinian liberation. Nathi will then lead us in an all-ages drawing exercise open to parents, kids, and everyone in between.

Nathi Ngubane is a South African-based writer and illustrator. His most recent work is From the River to the Sea: A Colouring Book (Social Bandit Media, 2024), which features illustrations that teach children about the injustice of the Nakba, the history and culture of the land, as well as key concepts driving and sustaining the Palestinian resistance.

Sold out!

This workshop will provide a historical overview of Tatreez as a Palestinian cultural practice and art, discussing the historical, cultural, social, and political importance of Tatreez for Palestine and Palestinians. Hala and Sabrene will then instruct workshop attendees on the basics of Tatreez and provide materials and patterns for their first Tatreez project.

Please note this is an IN-PERSON workshop that will take place at Open Books in Seattle, Washington.

Hala Saleh is a Tatreez practitioner who lives in the Seattle area. Hala practices the art of Tatreez both as a way to connect to her Palestinian heritage and culture, but also as a way to resist the erasure of Palestinian identity. Hala runs a local Tatreez circle for Palestinians (Seattle Resistance Tatreez), and teaches Tatreez with her good friend Sabrene Odeh.

Sabrene Odeh is the co-director of Baladna, an organization that hosts Palestinian events for the Pacific Northwest community. She is also a Tatreez instructor, community advocate, and proud Palestinian.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $25).

Step 2: Register for “A Poetry Reading for Gaza III” here.

Join Workshops4Gaza for our third online poetry reading featuring Sarah Ghazal Ali, George Abraham, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Cindy Juyoung Ok. The reading will be followed by a short moderated discussion and Q and A.

Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch and an Assistant Professor of English at Macalester College.

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, critic, performance artist. They are the author of When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America (Haymarket, 2026) and Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020), which won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are the executive editor of Mizna, and co-editor of HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket, 2025). They are a graduate of Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program, and teach at Amherst College as a Writer-in-Residence.

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American poet and author of Sitti’s Secrets, Habibi, 19 Varieties of Gazelle, The Turtle of Oman, Grace Notes, The Tiny Journalist, and many other books.

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward (Yale UP, 2024), the translator of Kim Hyesoon’s The Hell of That Star, and an assistant English professor at UC Davis.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $30).

Step 2: Register for “Settler Militarism” here.

In this workshop, Juliet Nebolon will discuss how settler colonialism and militarization simultaneously perpetuated, legitimated, and concealed one another in wartime Hawaiʻi for the purposes of U.S. empire-building across Asia and the Pacific Islands. Participants will then be invited to make connections between this historical period and the present and ongoing colonization of Hawaii by the U.S. military through issues such as RIMPAC, Red Hill, and more.

Juliet Nebolon is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Trinity College. Her research and teaching bring a transnational perspective to the study of race, indigeneity, and gender in the United States. She is the author of Settler Militarism: World War II in Hawai‘i and the Making of U.S. Empire (Duke UP, 2024).

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $50).

Step 2: Register for “Witnessing, Tourism, Solidarity” here.

In this workshop, Jenny Kelly will discuss the history of virtual tourism in Gaza as a form of resistance to the ongoing siege of the Strip. Participants will learn about the labor of Palestinian guides in organizing these tours, as well as how they creatively resist the severing of Gaza from the rest of Palestine by teaching life amidst cycles of genocidal bombardment. Prof. Kelly will then invite participants to reflect on the limitations and possibilities of virtual forms of solidarity, and what it might mean for Palestinians to one day fully control their own borders.

Jenny Kelly is an Associate Professor of feminist studies, critical race studies, and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz. Her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke UP, 2023) is a multi-site, interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine that shows how it emerged as an organizing strategy both embedded in and working against histories of displacement. Prof. Kelly is a founding member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and UC Santa Cruz’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine. She is also a member of Eyewitness Palestine’s Board of Directors.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $45USD).

Step 2: Register for “Memory for Forgetfulness: A Reading Group” here.

Join Bhakti Shringarpure and Suchitra Vijayan of the Radical Books Collective to read and discuss Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, a book of prose poetry about the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. This reading group will provide an accessible entrypoint for first-time readers of Darwish as well as poetry in general, while giving participants an opportunity to reflect on the current catastrophe in both Palestine and Lebanon.

Participants will have the option of meeting either online or in-person. In-person participation will be limited to 25, and the NYC address will be shared upon registration. All proceeds will go to the Sameer Project, and participants will be asked to purchase a copy of Memory for Forgetfulness from the W4G x Open Books site, where all proceeds are being donated to a different Gaza initiative each month.

Bhakti Shringarpure is the creative director of the Radical Books Collective, a community and solidarity building project that creates alternative approaches to reading by organizing book clubs, events, podcasts and immersive seminars.

Suchitra Vijayan is the author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India (Melville House, 2021) and the founder of the Polis Project.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $60).

Step 2: Register for “Poetics of Incantation” here.

Incantations have the power to cast spells and conjure other worlds. In this workshop, we'll look at the poetry of Etel Adnan, Inger Christensen, and Fred Moten to better understand how rhythm, repetition and ritual can be harnessed to their full power to build a poetics of incantation. This is a generative poetry writing course which will include in-class writing exercises and resources to write & exchange work after the workshop.

Tracy Fuad's second poetry collection, PORTAL, won the Phoenix Emerging Poets' Prize and was published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press. A 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she lives in Berlin, where she directs the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $50).

Step 2: Register for “Confronting Reproductive Imperialism” here.

This workshop will situate pregnancy criminalization, political attacks on abortion access, and the proliferation of "Cop Cities" within the context of biopolitical and necropolitical control of colonized peoples. We will define and discuss reproductive imperialism as policies and technologies which undermine self-determination that the U.S. imposes on its citizens at home, and exports internationally.

Participants will then consider the malleability of U.S. constitutional law, the limits of the UN Human Rights framework, and critically reflect on the strategies and tactics deployed by the U.S. reproductive justice movement. How can we reimagine reproductive justice as a global, interconnected movement that resists both local and transnational forms of reproductive oppression? What does a decolonial reproductive justice praxis look like? In this workshop, we will explore those answers together.

Jalessah T. Jackson is a Black queer (m)other based in Atlanta. They are a cultural worker, reproductive justice practitioner, community-based educator, and the founder of the Decolonial Feminist Collective (DFC), a political project utilizing decolonial Black feminist frameworks in political education, mutual aid, and international solidarity-building.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $40).

Step 2: Register for “MUSE: A Chapbook Launch and Reading” here.

Join Kelsey L. Smoot for a launch and reading of their new chapbook, MUSE—a collection of poems that invoke both “muses” and “musing,” about the people Kelsey loves, reveres, and reviles, poems that are decidedly southern, melancholic, and together comprise a discordant freedom song. Kelsey will be joined by fellow poets and performers Muhammad Khaerisman, Kiera “Ashlee Haze” Nelson, Nadia Said, and Paula Turcotte.

Kelsey L. Smoot (They/Them/He/Him) is a poet, advocate, frequent writer of critical analysis as well as a full-time PhD student in the interdisciplinary social sciences and humanities. They are the winner of the 2021 Sad Girls Club Literary Contest, the 2023 The Good Life Review Honeybee Prize, the Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 Button Poetry Video Contest, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a Best of the Net nominee, as well as the author of a chapbook titled WE WAS BOIS TOGETHER (Mouthfeel Press).

Muhammad Khaerisman (he/him) is a Muslim Indonesian-born, Alief, Houston-raised poet, actor and multidisciplinary storyteller. Co-Founder of FACES, an artist network and creative incubator for visionary performance and visual arts, Khaerisman travels the world building communities and collaborations.

Kiera “Ashlee Haze” Nelson (she/her) is a poet and spoken word artist from Atlanta by way of Chicago. She has been a part of the Atlanta Poetry circuit for over a decade and has been writing for over 15 years. Her sophomore book SMOKE was released in 2020.

Nadia Said is a Palestinian poet living in the diaspora. She will be published in the upcoming poetry anthology Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket Books, 2025) and Sapiens Magazine

Paula Turcotte lives in Moh'kins'stis (colonially known as Calgary, Alberta). She is the author of the chapbook Permutations (Baseline Press, 2024). Paula serves as a poetry editor at MAYDAY, where she first had the pleasure of reading Kelsey's work.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $60).

Step 2: Register for “Verses of the Watched” here.

This workshop examines the rich lineage of poetry that interrogates how surveillance shapes issues of national security, personal privacy, and the visibility of Arab and other marginalized communities. We will analyze the craft of those under watch, studying how they write about, against, and under surveillance.

We will explore the work of poets including Solmaz Sharif, Claudia Rankine, Tariq Dobbs, Maricela Guerrero, and Khadijah Queen, paying attention to poems that both mask and reveal, encode and declare. From the stark halls of military bases to the intimate corners of private life, these poets challenge the boundaries of visibility and silence. Bring your eyes & your watching back. 

Maya Salameh is the author of HOW TO MAKE AN ALGORITHM IN THE MICROWAVE (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Offing, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, AGNI, ANMLY, and the LA Times, among others. She can be found @mayaslmh or mayasalameh.com. She dreams of a free Palestine.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (sugg. donation $60).

Step 2: Register for “Collaging Possibility and Futurity” here.

We arrive at collage art as a way of building anew out of the existing, as world-building practice. In this workshop, we’ll collage together as a method of insisting on futurity, of questioning who we are at our most free, and what elements need tearing apart, reorienting, layering, shifting, and/or re-rooting to arrive there.

Through generative art-making prompts and discussion around existing collage artworks that embody anti-colonialism and radical imagination, we will create collages that activate mixed media for protest, perspective-shifting, and beyond.

Ayling Zulema Dominguez is a poet, educator, and community artist who writes and creates against borders, toward land rematriation, and the embodiment of abolitionist futurisms. Their storytelling is rooted ancestrally in the lands of Puebla, Mexico (Nahua) and the island of Quisqueya.

Motyko Morales is a first generation Honduran-Cuban multi-disciplinary artist and organizer from Seminole-Tequesta land, Miami, Florida. Her work is rooted in imagining a world free of borders and carceral systems.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $60).

Step 2: Register for “The Criminalization of Student Protest” here.

This workshop turns to the history of the targeting of civilian populations in 20th century wars as a means of deterrence and subjugation. Historically, student protests have been ways to acknowledge and decry modern war’s pursuit of those populations. We will discuss how the criminalization of student protests has been a response to that acknowledgment and denunciation.

Roderick A. Ferguson is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity Books, 2018), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (UC Press, 2017),  The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (U of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (U of Minnesota, 2004).

Registration for this workshop is now full!

Want to learn to reinforce worn clothes, patch tears, stitch a wall hanging, or decorate your own small half-moon pouch? In “Sashiko 101,” participants will learn the basics of sashiko, a type of traditional Japanese embroidery used to reinforce cloth, and will leave the workshop with their own decorated small half-moon zippered pouch.

Sarah will provide all participants with a starter kit consisting of pre-cut indigo fabric, black zipper, white sashiko thread, needle, needle threader, pins, and assorted extra patches of fabric for future decoration and mending, and will teach the basics of sashiko step-by-step. Participants will have time to decorate their fabric or patch their clothes, and enjoy learning a new craft in community.

Note: This is an IN-PERSON workshop. Registration is limited to 20 participants.

Sarah Matsui is an interdisciplinary writer and the winner of the Sewanee Review Nonfiction Contest, the Fractured Lit Contest, and the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. Her first book, Learning From Counternarratives in Teach For America, was featured in NPR Code Switch, Jacobin Magazine, and Rethinking Schools Magazine’s “Our Picks for Books for Social Justice Teaching: Policy.” Her poems and essays have appeared in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, The Southern Review, The Seventh Wave, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Pleiades. She is currently a 2024-2025 resident with the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $60).

Step 2: Register for “On Subversion and Cooptation” here.

In this workshop, Shellyne Rodriguez will discuss ideas of subversion and cooptation in relation to anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle, as framed through her drawing practice as an artist. The talk will be followed by a Q and A and discussion.

Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $45).

Step 2: Register for “The Third Event” here.

In this workshop, participants will explore key reading methodologies for engaging the ideas and writings of Sylvia Wynter.

Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican writer and performer whose work combines the insights of Black expressive traditions and practices with natural sciences, the humanities, and anti-colonial struggles to consider how Black life holds the keys to understanding both our current predicaments and the practices / ways of life that might allow us to break from these predicaments.

Both avid readers of Wynter’s writings and those new to her work will familiarize themselves with her key interlocutors and methodological insights. The goal of the workshop is to offer a supportive environment to those who feel drawn to Wynter’s writing and would like to better engage her work on its own terms.

Bedour Alagraa is Assistant Professor of Political and Social Thought in the Department of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is interested in Black radical genealogies in political theory, history/ies of political concepts, Caribbean thought, African anti-colonial thought, and Black Marxisms, among other topics.

She has also studied and written extensively on the works of Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter, and is a member of the editorial team currently editing Wynter’s monograph, Black Metamorphosis.

Her book manuscript, The Interminable Catastrophe (forthcoming from Duke University Press) charts a conceptual history of catastrophe as a political category / concept (rather than Event) via its inauguration in early modern natural science and empiricist debates, and subsequent crystallization as a concept on the plantation. It also considers how we might interrupt the “Bad Infinity” of the catastrophic, via the works of Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, Clyde Woods, Derek Walcott, and others.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $45USD).

Step 2: Register for “Literary Sportswriting” here.

Whether you're a current or former athlete yourself or just love watching the game, humans are fascinated by the ways our bodies can move. But how do we write about sports so readers feel like they're experiencing the magic themselves?

In this literary sportswriting workshop, you'll be inspired to start crafting an essay that captures the fun, excitement, and edge-of-your-seat thrill of your favorite sport. Whether you love team sports, action sports, or individual physical pursuits like running or yoga, you'll deep dive into memory to recall the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures that bring sports to life. You’ll also engage with writing prompts that will help you find the story behind the story––the social, political, and personal aspects that make sports more than the sum of their parts and keep readers coming back for more.

Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is an Alabama-born Appalachian and Palestinian-American writer who calls Columbus, Ohio, home. Their essays, poetry, and short stories have been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and others. Their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland was released in 2024 from Belt Publishing, and their second book, a poetry collection titled We Had Mansions, is forthcoming from Diode Editions in 2025. Read more at mandyshunnarah.com.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $45).

Step 2: Register for “Grief, Rage and Healing” here.

In this workshop, participants will learn the fundamentals of songwriting and will write a song together to collectively grieve the losses caused by the genocide of the Palestinian people. This will be a space to channel rage and sorrow into a healing song of our making. Participants will leave the workshop with a song that they can return to when they are feeling hopeless, reminding them they are not the only one wanting Palestinian liberation and land back now.

Anais Azul (they/them) is a Peruvian-born, California-grown composer, vocalist, and Charango player. Today their music transports us to a dreamy realm where Andean sounds and experimental electronic production are tied together through stories and lyrics as well as migration, healing and resilience in English, Spanish and Quechua.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $45USD).

Step 2: Register for “Muin Bseiso and the History of Anticolonialism in Gaza” here.

In this workshop, participants will join Prof. Esmat Elhalaby in reading and discussing translated excerpts from Muin Bseiso’s 1971 Gaza Diaries in order to consider the long history of anticolonial resistance in the Gaza strip.

Muin Bseso (1926-1984) was one of the most prominent Palestinian writers of the 20th century. Best known for his poetry, Bseiso was also a widely published and performed playwright, critic and journalist, contributing significantly to Arab literary and political culture from the 1950’s onward. Born in Gaza, Bseiso was also a major chronicler of Gaza’s history and for a time served as the secretary general of the Communist Party in the Gaza strip—political activity which would land him in Egyptian jails.

He was also deeply involved in the Afro-Asian Writers Association and served as the co-editor of the Association’s magazine Lotus while it was published in Beirut (1978-1982) alongside Faiz Ahmed Faiz. His writing includes memoirs from prison, plays about Che Guevarra and the Zanj Revolt, travelogues of India and the Soviet Union, and studies of Israeli literature.

Participants will receive and read translated excerpts of Gaza Diaries, which recount the history of colonial rule in Gaza and Palestinian anti-colonial resistance. As Gaza’s writers are murdered, archives burned and school turned to rubble, Bseiso’s work offers a history of Gaza on its own terms, against genocide.

Note: This workshop will be IN-PERSON at Recirculation in New York City.

Esmat Elhalaby is a historian of colonial and anticolonial thought in West and South Asia. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto.

Registration for this workshop is now full!

What does it mean to be a revolutionary femme in 2024 in a time of genocide and yet survival? What are femme literary lineages and strategies, and what are the revolutionary femme poems and poetics this time demands we write?

Participants will read poetry and mixed media work by Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Trish Salah, Torrin Greathouse, Mark Aguilar, Danez Smith, Kai Cheng Thom and Stefani Echverria Fenn and consider femme traditions of rant, manifesto, rigorous lyric and discursive exploration of monstrous body in how we write to document, dream and femifest. We will also write our asses off.

Workshop will be in Zoom with CART, with a text based space to post work. ASL provided upon request. This workshop will be capped at 40 participants and center BIPOC and non-cisgender femmes.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is an old ass bitch who has seen some shit and done a lot of the rest. They are the author or co-editor of 10 books, including The Future Is Disabled, Care Work, Bodymap, Dirty River and Tonguebreaker.

A longtime disabled and transformative justice person and maker of QTBIPOC creation spaces, they won the Lambda, are a 5 times Publishing Triangle shortlister, a 2020-21 Disability Futures Fellowship winner and the winner of the 2021 Jeanne Cordova Award "in recognition of a lifetime of documenting the complexities of queer of color, femme and/or disabled existence."

Step 1: Donate to the Sameer Project here (suggested donation $60 USD).

Step 2: Register for “Afropessimism 101” here.

There is an irreconcilable distinction between human beings and blacks, and this split structures the modern world. This is the base principle of afropessimism, a meta-critique of critical theory which argues that global civil society, the regime of human being, depends on anti-blackness to function.

After reading selected texts, we will gather to discuss the vast implications of this analytic - as thinkers, artists, and living people - and what it takes to nurture a culture of (world-ending) politics that remains unrealized.

Register ASAP to afford pre-reading time!

Jon Jon Moore Palacios is a writer and scholar of afropessimism, poetry, and the paranormal. He received his MA in African-American Studies from UC Berkeley and has received fellowships from the Community of Writers Workshop, the Center for African Studies at UC Berkeley, the San Francisco Public Library, and Harvard Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research. His criticism and poetry has been published in the Cleveland Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Offing, Qui Parle, and more.

Step 1: Donate to Lebanon Solidarity Collective here (suggested donation $60USD).

Step 2: Register for “Herbalism and the State” here.

Herbal medicine has long been used as a tool for self-determined, culturally-based, liberatory medicine. However, it has also been used for colonial and imperial gain. This workshop will explore the ways that fascist governments and people employ herbal medicine for public relations while committing atrocities.

Participants will have the opportunity to critically reflect on their lineages and connections to medicine to see how they either reinforce systems of domination or strengthen their relationship to land and liberation.

Shabina Lafleur-Gangji is an acupuncturist, Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner, and community herbalist living on occupied Dish With Many Spoons treaty land. Her work is rooted in the principles of self-determination and liberation. She tends to a half-acre medicine garden and is the co-director of Seed Soil Spirit, a grassroots Herb school run by and primarily for Black, Indigenous and other racialized people working to uplift traditional plant knowledge.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $60 USD).

Step 2: Register for “How to Start Your Own Mobile Liberation Library” here.

In this workshop, volunteers from the Refaat Alareer mobile library in Atlanta will discuss how the collective came to be and what it has meant to volunteers and communities. You'll also receive practical advice on how to start and sustain a liberation library, from gathering volunteers to collaborating with bookstores and publishers, holding events and more.

The Refaat Alareer Mobile Library is a traveling, volunteer-operated, liberation library and mutual aid project based on Muscogee land (otherwise known as Atlanta, GA). The primary purpose is to promote and increase access to political education towards the liberation of Palestinians from Zionist occupation in this lifetime and to respond to the urgent needs of Palestinians most immediately affected by the genocidal siege on Gaza since October 2023.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $60USD).

Step 2: Register for “Finish Your Book” here.

Tearing your hair out, trying to finish your poetry manuscript? In "Finish Your Book," participants will come up with a writing plan to turn their pages of poetry into a publishable book. This workshop will give an overview of different organizational structures for your book, review strategies for generating new work and editing the old, and guide you through a plan of action for finishing your manuscript. It doesn't have to be a painful process!

Muriel Leung is the author of the novel How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster (W.W. Norton & Company), Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books) which won the Poetry Society of America’s 2022 Four Quartets Prize, Bone Confetti (Noemi Press), and Images Seen to Images Felt (Antenna) in collaboration with artist Kristine Thompson. She received her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from University of Southern California where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World fellow. She is faculty at California Institute of the Arts.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $60USD).

Step 2: Register for “Directed by Desire” here.

In this multi-genre online workshop, Melissa Febos and Donika Kelly will lead participants in a series of generative writing exercises inspired by the poems of June Jordan, along themes of justice, embodiment, and the erotic. There will be opportunities to share, though no feedback will be given. The session will conclude with a Q&A.

Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of five books of nonfiction, including Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the forthcoming memoir, The Dry Season. She teaches at the University of Iowa.

Donika Kelly is the author of three poetry collections, including Bestiary, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; as well as the forthcoming The Natural Order of Things. She also teaches at the University of Iowa.

Step 1: Donate to Sameer Project here (suggested donation $60 USD).

Step 2: Register for “How To Read, Honey” here.

In a world where an increasing amount of our lives are mediated through technology, understanding how to critically read media is more important than ever. In this interactive workshop, students will join Steven Thrasher, the (currently suspended) chair of social justice in reporting at the Medill School of Journalism and author of the "Journalism as a Front of War" column at LitHub, in learning how to read traditional and social media with a critical eye.

Breaking down such key concepts as Critical Theory, Hallin's Spheres of Consensus, the Overton Window and Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model (aka the Five Filters of Manufacturing Consent), participants will leave the workshop with concrete tools for more deeply reading literature, Twitter, Instagram, TV, holiday movies, Christmas music, and "news use can actually use.”

Steven W. Thrasher, PhD, holds the Daniel Renberg chair at Northwestern University, the first journalism professorship in the world to focus on LGBTQ Issues. He is also a faculty member of the Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing.

His debut book The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll when Inequality and Disease Collide was an New York Times Paperback Editors Pick, named one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews, was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Literature, and won the 2023 POZ Award for Best in Literature. He holds a PhD in American Studies from NYU and his new book The Overseer Class will be published by Amistad Book in 2026.