Frank X. Walker and Stacy Hawkins Adams are starting their residencies at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center for Week Five with a faculty reading at 3:30 p.m. Sunday in the Hall of Philosophy.
Throughout the week Walker will lead a workshop — called “Difficult Questions, Poetic Wonderings: Vulnerability and the Self” — focused on exploring difficult questions in poetic forms.
Walker is a multidisciplinary artist and educator, author of 13 poetry collections and children’s book A is for Affrilachia, and author of 2014 Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle book selection When Winter Come. He is the first African American writer to be honored as Kentucky Poet Laureate, and the co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets. He is currently a professor of creative writing and African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky.
“(In his workshop, Walker is) looking at how to take experiences from life and the strong people we know, our friends and families — and ourselves, in many ways,” said Manager of Literary Arts Stephine Hunt. “(Attendees will learn) how to find those vulnerable places and emphasize them in ways that don’t take power away from our poetic imaginings of the world, but instead enhance the strength.”
Prose writer-in-residence Adams is a former reporter and columnist, and award-winning author and poet of nine women’s fiction novels and three nonfiction books. She currently has a blog called “Life Untapped,” and shares motivational messages on WTVR CBS 6’s “Virginia This Morning.”
For Sunday’s reading, she will read from some of her novels and her most recent single-poem chapbook, The Pivot, and discuss personal responsibility and authentic selves, looking to tie the conversation into the Week Five Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “Spiritual Grounding for Social Change.”
“If we show up as our most authentic selves, we’re adding something powerful to the world,” she said, “and that in and of itself is going to lead to justice, … and a diverse, empowered world.”
Adams will also be leading a workshop this week called “Empower Your Writer Within” through Special Studies. The workshop will focus on refining writing goals and methods, and taking material from the idea stage to a finished novel.
“I think all cliches are true,” she said. “There’s a cliche that says there’s nothing new under the sun. We know that’s true, but I also believe that everyone has a story, and everyone has something important to say.”
Adams wants workshop attendees to realize that words have the ability to inspire and empower themselves and others, and hopes they leave the workshop with tools to get their writing across the finish line.
“Every single person that feels led to write something, there’s a reason for that,” said Adams. “Once they get that written, there may be someone else in the world who might be impacted in some way by what they’ve written.”
