“Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.”
—Alice Walker

Some exciting upcoming news for 2022: 

In February, I’ll once again be teaching Dear Friend, a 5-week virtual class on epistolary writing, with Holly Wren Spaulding. Here’s the link to sign up. This is the only class I’m scheduled to teach this year. If you’ve been thinking about taking a writing class in 2022, I hope you’ll take a look at this offering. 

Also coming up next weekend (Jan 21-23) is the Taking Care Virtual Literary Conference, hosted by Rochester-based literary arts center Writers & Books. They have a fantastic lineup of speakers and panelists, including my co-teacher Holly, who’ll be reading and speaking on a panel about letterpress and zines as activism. 

I curated Sunday’s programming, which includes conversations about translation, letterpress, race, and disability. Two of the four Sunday panels, “Writing Illness: Mental Health, Chronic Pain, and Disability” and “Beyond the Black and White Binary,”are free to the public, both underwritten by a grant I received from the Disability Visibility Project in order to make them accessible to the public. You can register for those panels, as well as for Kwame Dawes’s keynote on literary citizenship, for free here.

Writers & Books has also extended the early bird date to register for the entire conference for a reduced cost until January 17th.

*The image at the top is from my postcard collaboration with visual artist Kirin Makker. I used cursive to handwrite epigraphs I’m using within my second book on postcard-sized watercolor paper and Kirin responded to the epigraph and my initial handwriting and painted these cards. 

Warmly,
Sejal

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This letter was originally sent out on January 15, 2021. Thanks for reading my newsletter. If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, you can read previous issues or subscribe here.