Tales that Travel: Storytelling Practices from a Global Perspective with Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

SATURDAY, September 23rd
2:00–5:00 pm ET

While students of writing are often presented with a familiar list of works from a standardized academic canon that are held up as examples to learn from, the boundaries of storytelling expand far beyond these. In this generative workshop, students will review examples of global storytelling that offer alternative voices, structures, and styles that can be incorporated into their own writing practice. Assigned reading will include selections from Elaine Castillo, Amos Tutuola, Gogu Shyamala, Kuzhali Manickavel and others. Writers will have an opportunity to implement these techniques and discuss them in a small group setting. They will leave the workshop with usable craft techniques that will enable their work to be in conversation with pieces grounded in styles that have been historically underrepresented in American literature.

eligibility:

This craft class is open to all writers of color. The non-refundable tuition fee is $50. This class will be held over Zoom. There are scholarship spots available, and the applications are open through Sunday, September 3rd.

REGISTRATION FOR THIS CLASS IS NOW CLOSED.

FACULTY:

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri is a mixed South Asian American writer from Northern California. Her debut collection of short stories, What We Fed to the Manticore (Tin House 2022), was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2023 Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, the 2023 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and was selected as a 2023 ALA RUSA Notable Book. It’s available now wherever books are sold. Her short fiction has been published in the minnesota review, Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, The Common, One Story, Orion, Five Dials, and the Adroit Journal.


A lifelong Californian, Talia lives in the Central Valley with her husband, a teacher and printmaker, and a very skittish cat named Fig.