Creating Diverse and Inclusive Characters

Member Price: $125
SummerWrite Week 1
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.

Workshops are conducted EST via Zoom, a virtual platform that allows you to participate in exercises and contribute to group conversation. To participate, please register by the deadline using the ticket portal below, or go to Scholarships. Zoom links are emailed to registered participants.

Scholarships Available