The East Side Freedom Library invites you to “Writers Who Dare,” with Sherry Quan Lee and Seven Writers on Saturday, January 27, 1:00PM-2:30PM​, @ East Side Freedom Library.

How Dare We! Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse offers a much needed corrective to the usual dry and uninspired creative writing pedagogy. The collection asks us to consider questions, such as “What does it mean to work through resistance from supposed mentors, to face rejection from publishers and classmates, and to stand against traditions that silence you?” Editor Sherry Quan Lee will provide an overview of the collection and seven writers will read excerpts of their own essays.

SHERRY QUAN LEE,  MFA, University of Minnesota, recently retired from teaching Creative Writing at Metropolitan State University.  She is the author of Chinese Blackbird, a memoir in verse, published 2002 by the Asian American Renaissance, republished 2008 by Loving Healing Press/Modern History Press who also published, How to Write a Suicide Note:  serial essays that saved a woman’s life, 2008.  Quan Lee’s most recent publications include: Love Imagined: a mixed race memoir, a 2015 Minnesota Book Award Finalist, and editor of the anthology How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse, 2017, both LHP/MHP. She was a poetry mentor for the 2015-2016 Loft Literary Center’s Series in Poetry and Creative Prose.

SHERRIE FERNANDEZ-WILLIAMS earned an MFA in writing from Hamline University and is a recipient of an Artist Initiative Award through the Minnesota State Arts Board, a Beyond the Pure Fellowship, and a SASE/ Jerome Grant through Intermedia Arts of Minneapolis. In addition, she was a Loft Mentor Series winner for Creative Nonfiction, a Jones’ Commission Award Winner through the Playwrights’ Center, and was selected for the Givens Black Writers Collaborative Retreat. She has been published in various literary journals and anthologies and is the author of the memoir Soft.

ISELA XITLALI GÓMEZ R. is an East LA/Inland Empire transplant who writes to piece together broken stories of family, trauma, and travel a la Southern California. Her art lays its roots in the spaces between jazz and mariachi, taco trucks and chili cheese burgers, oceans and desert, and now snow. Isela is a 2015 winner of the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction.

HEI KYONG KIM’s first collection of poetry and prose, The Translation of Han, was released in June 2014 by CQT Publishing and Media. Her additional work can be found (also under Beth Kyong Lo) in numerous journals and anthologies, including Parenting as Adoptees, Outsiders Within, Seeds from a Silent Tree, PajNtaub Voice, Journal of Asian American Renaissance, New Truths: Writing in the 21st Century by Korean Adoptees, and Adoption Today.

LUIS LOPEZ grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. He has made his home in the Twin Cities for nearly a decade. He recently graduated with a degree in Creative Writing from Metropolitan State University and is considering pursuing a Master of Fine Arts.

SAGIRAH SHAHID is a poet. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She enjoys the fact that according to the tiny green seal on the outside of the packet of ramen noodles she just “made,” her noodles are Halal certified.

CHRISTINE STARK is an award-winning writer, visual artist, national and international speaker of Anishinaabe and Cherokee ancestry. Her first novel, Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation, was a Lambda Literary Finalist. Her essays, poems, and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including University of Pennsylvania Law Review; The WIP; Florida Review; The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prize Winning Essays; When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwest Experience; Hawk and Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability; and many others. Her poem “Momma’s Song” was recorded by Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble as a double manga CD. She is also a co-editor of Not for Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography and a coauthor of “Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota.” In 2012 she was named a “Changemaker” by the Minnesota Women’s Press. Currently, she is completing her second novel, Carnival Lights. She has taught writing and humanities courses at universities and community colleges. Currently, she is the project coordinator of the Two-Spirit program at the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center. She is completing an MSW at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. For more information: www.christinestark.com

LORI YOUNG-WILLIAMS is a poet, prose writer, and creative writing teacher. She has taught several workshops at various locations in the Twin Cities and Greater Minnesota. She has a Bachelor of Science in Human Relationships and a Master of Liberal Studies, both from the University of Minnesota. She has been published in various poetry anthologies and has self-published two chapbooks. She is currently working on her memoir about her biracial family and growing up in the suburbs of St. Paul, Minnesota.