Creating Diverse and Inclusive Characters
*The event has already taken place on this date: Fri, 07/16/2021
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July 12 – 16
5 Sessions, 3 hours
Ages: Teens
Deadline to Register: July 5, 11:59 pm
Instructor: Melissa Michal Slocum
Are you passionate about important social dialogues? Do you want to incorporate a more diverse and inclusive range of characters, but aren’t sure how? We will discuss important strategies for writing characters outside your own experiences in ways that are respectful and aimed at understanding multiple perspectives and ways of being. Feel free to bring with you a project you are already working on, such as a novel, outline, or short story. There also will be opportunities to create new story ideas. Together, we will learn how to be better, more thoughtful interactors with the world around us.
Melissa Michal Slocum is of Seneca, Welsh, and English descent. A fiction writer, essayist, photographer, and literature and creative writing professor. She has a MFA from Chatham University, MA from Penn State, and PhD from Arizona State University, where she focused on education and representation of Indigenous histories and literatures in curriculum. She has read at the National American Indian Museum and Amerind Museum, and has published in The Florida Review, Yellow Medicine Review, and the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program’s Narrative Witnessing Project. Her short story collection, Living Along the Borderlines, was a finalist for the Louise Meriwether First Book Prize.
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