Writing toward Healing with Nynke Passi & Jennifer Espinoza

MIU MFA faculty, poets, and writers Jennifer Espinoza and Nynke Passi help facilitate a transformation from trauma to healing.

MIU MFA faculty and poets and writers Jennifer Espinoza and Nynke Passi reprise their winter Soul Bone workshop, Writing toward Healing. They will share from their own work and offer suggestions and ideas how you use writing as a healing modality and transform your stories creatively in a manner that transforms. What helps you write toward self-care and a reframing of your own narrative? How do you deal with it when you are stuck in fight/flight/freeze/fawn when you try to tell your story? What is an empowered vision for yourself as a writer?

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet. Her work has been featured in Poetry, Denver Quarterly, American Poetry Review, Poem-a-Day, Lambda Literary, PEN America, The Offing, and elsewhere. Her full-length collection THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS was published by Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2016. She also is the author of I’m Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019). She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and is a frequent faculty and mentor in our MFA.

Nynke Salverda Passi is the director of this MFA program and co-chair of the English dept. She was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been published in CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Life & Legends, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth & Sky (Blue Light Press), Carrying the Branch (Glass Lyre Press), and Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press). Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry collection Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day.