The Free Generative Writing Workshop for August

Co-sponsored by PorchLight and Iowa City Poetry, the Free Generative Writing Workshops provide a space for career writers, curious beginners, writers of all income levels and stages of life. Our goal is to make it easy to meet and learn from some of the most talented writer/teachers living in or passing through Iowa City. Every month a new writer leads a generative workshop, presenting a prompt inspired by their own preoccupations, passions, or interests. It has been an adventure, and we are continually inspired by the creative concentration of participants, and the powerful beginnings the workshop generates.

This month's leader:

David James “DJ” Savarese is an artful activist, multi-genre writer, teacher, and public scholar. A 2022-23 Iowa Arts Fellow and Zoeglossia Fellow, he is the author of Swoon (2022), whose title poem is nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In addition to a co-authored chapbook Studies in Brotherly Love (PromptPress, 2021) and a poetic series A Doorknob for the Eye (2017), his poems have been published by Poetry Foundation, Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock, A Hole in the Wall, The Red Wheelbarrow, Seneca Review, Bellingham Review, Nine Mile Magazine, Stone Canoe, Prospect, wordgatherings, and The Art of Autism. His lyric essay “Passive Plants”, published in the Iowa Review, was a Pushcart Prize nominee and a notable essay in Best American Essays (2018). He teaches inclusive, multigenerational, global poetry writing classes through Listen2Us and poetry writing courses for alternatively communicating autistics through the LYNX Project in Chicago. A public scholar, he teaches and presents nationally on a range of topics, including the NEH-sponsored talk on “Disrupting Ableism Through Artful Activism.” More recent scholarship includes an article in Logic Magazine titled “Disrupting the Garden Wall”; a co-authored essay titled “Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability” in Er(r)go; and a chapter “Unearthing the Concepts That Bury Us,” forthcoming in a scholarly anthology, Disability in Dialogue. He is also the co-producer, narrative commentator, and subject of the Peabody award-winning documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery (2017). Before moving to Iowa City, DJ graduated with a double major in Anthropology and Creative Writing from Oberlin College in 2017.

​ To attend online or find out more about the Free Generative Workshops visit https://www.freegenerative.org