It Matters How We Say This: Workshop and Reading Series with Saretta Morgan

The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands is pleased to host Ich Chuuvawve Teaching Fellow Saretta Morgan for a two-part workshop and reading series on March 21st. Beyond being a CIB fellow, Saretta has been a warm and active member of Phoenix’s creative writing community for many years. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating her.

 “It Matters How We Say This” Performance Workshop: How does a script become a collective body? In this workshop, we'll consider modes of attention, collaboration, and intervention that allow texts to move through us. Participants will engage in generative writing exercises, (accessible) movement prompts, and porous discussion all with the goal of cultivating a performance style unique to their own body and practice.

• 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. at CIB in Durham Hall, 6th floor
• Space in the workshop is limited. Please be sure to RSVP to dearsaretta@proton.me.
• Lunch will be served.

 “A Celebration of Alt-Nature” Reading: Join Gabrielle Civil and LaTasha N. Navada Diggs in a reading and reception to celebrate Saretta Morgan's debut collection, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press), poems that illuminate an anti-map of interior poetics and converging horizons where the languages that instantiate violence move in desert dreams and riverbeds alongside those which prepare the body for love. Reception at 6:30pm. Readings at 7:30pm. Book signing to follow.

• 6:30 p.m. - 9 p.m. at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore
• Appetizers will be served.  

Saretta Morgan is the author of Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), and the chapbooks Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling, 2018), and room for a counter interior (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2017).

 Her work engages the ecologies and forms of connectivity that manifest in the shadows of militarization, incarceration, and U.S. imperialism. She has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Tucson MoCA, Tamaas Cross Cultural Organization, Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and elsewhere. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation. From 2018-2023 she lived between Mojave and Akimel O'odham lands in the Arizona desert, where she organized with the grassroots humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths Phoenix. Born in Appalachia and raised on military installations, she currently lives on Mvskoke lands in Atlanta, GA. She believes in a Free Palestine as part of the broader inevitability of LANDBACK for Indigenous peoples across the globe.