Supporters and Collaborators

blkcowrie 🌸

For my workshop, Coding Your Cosmos: “As someone interested in the vitality of transformation, I often consider the potential power of poetry’s capacity to dial into our souls.

How the spiritual and sensory data interplay with human matrices. How language, written and spoken, is merely collectively agreed upon assigned significations of scribbles and grunts, of noise. How poetry is the playground and lab of our evolving expression. How awareness of these processes may afford us more community protection and nuanced collective vision. And how our own uniquenesses may have more of a menu to play with when we are more conscious of our agency in how we evolve.

‘Coding the Cosmos’, poet Sherese Francis’ generative workshop series, considers these and other nerd-glam existential questions coupled with how poetry dances in our hearts and flirts with our minds. The first session had me happily full yet hungry for more: more delicious concepts to tinker with, more evocative poetry selections to parse, more provocative prompts to scrawl. Sherese kept the session at a clip while steadily introducing concepts, encouraging peer discussion, and managing 3 rounds of collective writing — all the while providing a warm space for us to birth and share our freshly-crafted spells. Not an easy balance to provide amid strangers upon first meeting in the best of conditions but her skill and success in doing so is especially appreciated in our current zoom culture climate.”

Danielle Gauthier

“Sherese Francis is a self-determined creator who delves deeply into the connections between language and lived experience, using wordplay to illuminate fresh perspectives. With a unique sensitivity to how sound can spark ideas, they blend and reshape words in intuitive and unexpected ways, creating didactic narratives that inspire new connections across disciplines and worlds. Sherese’s style is often forward-looking, blending the new and the familiar to engage readers in a transformative experience. Through their thoughtful curations of life’s patterns and tendencies, Sherese guides readers toward deeper self-awareness.“

Queens Memory

A project within Queens Public Library that collects personal histories, photographs and other records of contemporary life in Queens, New York.

harlequin creature
hc, founded by meghan forbes (Central & Eastern European Avant-Garde Art/Publishing Scholar, Translator), was a collaborative platform that welcomed suggestions for cooperative publishing projects, and also paired with a variety of public institutions to conduct innovative creative writing and art-making workshops.

Lewis Latimer House Museum
The house of black inventor and draftsman Lewis Latimer, which was turned into a museum in Flushing, NYC.

Women Writers in Bloom
Monthly workshop, reading and open mic featuring women writers.

SEQAA (Southeast Queens Artist Alliance)
Artist alliance dedicated to building the artist community through networking, resource sharing, and creating public art projects in Southeast Queens, NY.

Free Verse   
Weekly writing workshop in NeON spaces.