Writing the Threshold: Poetry for Liminal Spaces and Times

Join us for a generative writing workshop with Professor Ian-Khara Ellasante, PhD followed by a Trans Poetics Showcase featuring Littlefawn Ketchum, Violet Ferlito and Calla Eris Orion and a special reading with the professor. We drift in and out of liminality throughout our lives; many of us occupy liminal, or threshold, spaces for the entire duration of our lives. Gloria Anzaldúa refers to the threshold—this transformative “unstable, unpredictable, precarious” state—as nepantla, “a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio.” In this workshop, we will explore the ways that we are all, at various points or perpetually, in the threshold. While acknowledging the disorientation and alienation often present in the threshold and hybrid spaces we occupy, we will focus on the freedom, unique perspectives, and creative potential available there. Through writing, we’ll greet these aspects of our identities and experiences with generosity and affirmation—and give some serious side-eye to the socially-constructed binaries that make the threshold a precarious place.