Sunset Social is Yafa’s bi-monthly community gathering that celebrates poetry. In our second social, we will host a workshop with Kamelya Omayma Youssef and Jenna Hamed, where we will make books of poems that already exist in your own diary pages. As we find ways to say what needs to be said out loud, we speak to ourselves in private. We have the right to practice expression in the meantime.

In this workshop, we will guide participants to assemble poems in the practice of the fragmented journal, in which we will seek to explore omission and pronounced silence as a tool of agency. We will play along the spectrum of visibility and non, in fugitive SWANA girl fashion, an art we have mastered for as long as secrets exist.

We invite participants to bring their private journals with them (yes, your diaries, with deep respect for confidentiality), as well as material to collage. Together we will explore the poetic space along the spectrum of private and public expression, guided by sound, breath, and urgencies, disrupting linearity and interrogating it. In the same session, we will guide writers to make books structured by the poems they contain (and not the other way around). We will prepare to make accordion books but participants can also practice their own book forms, as fit their texts. Materials provided include ink pens, typewriters, watercolor, pastels, colored waxed thread, collage materials.

Participants should bring excerpts from their journals as well as any other collage material or ephemera they may want to incorporate into their book.

Kamelya Omayma Youssef [poet] teaches, writes, edits, works, and lives in NYC. She is the author of A book with a hole in it (Wendy’s Subway). Jenna Hamed is an artist and art worker based in Queens.

Due to limited seating capacity, registration is required.