Begins: April 3, 2023
Instructor: Cinelle Barnes
Location: Online (weekly video meet-up Mon 6-9pm ET)
Fee: $450
A writing sample is recommended for this class. Please fill out an application.
Through group discussion of student work, plus that of published authors, writers in this workshop will examine the art and craft of creative nonfiction. The focus will be on learning to understand and use a full range of literary techniques in order to tell a truly compelling nonfiction story. Topics such as the use of dialogue, the creation of scene, attention to style and how to craft structure from true events will be discussed. Participants will also spend time talking about the particular responsibilities that come with writing creative nonfiction.
This workshop is open to writers working on memoir, personal essays or in-depth journalism, and students should have writing and writing class experience.
Cinelle Barnes is a formerly undocumented memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of MONSOON MANSION: A MEMOIR (Little A, 2018, Booklist starred review) and MALAYA: ESSAYS ON FREEDOM (Little A, 2019), and the editor of the New York Times New & Noteworthy book, A MEASURE OF BELONGING: 21 WRITERS OF COLOR ON THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH (Hub City Press, 2020).
Cinelle earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Longreads, Garden & Gun, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed Reader, Literary Hub, Hyphen, and CNN Philippines, among others. Her essay, “Carefree White Girls, Careful Brown Girls”, is anthologized in A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home (Catapult, 2020).
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. She is the 2021 Vulgar Geniuses Nonfiction Honorary Awardee for her writing and social justice work and 2021 writer-in-residence at Pasadena City College, and was a Focus Fellowship artist-in-residence at AIR Serenbe in 2020, a short-term writer-in-residence at City of Asylum in 2019, and the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, where she and her family live. In 2021, Cinelle was named one of 50 Most Influential by Charleston Business, joining thought leaders in state and local politics, the arts, academia, activism, healthcare, and business.
She is currently at work on a narrative nonfiction book on climate justice, the Philippine water crisis, and Philippine spirituality and folklore.